... on the wings of imagination, but still akin to the intellect proper, though exalted above it. The Higher Mind is a spiritual plane,—this does not answer to that description. But the larger poetic intelligence like the larger philosophic, though in a different cast of thinking, is nearer to the Higher Mind than the ordinary intellect and can more easily receive its influence. When Milton starts his poem... 1 "Second line Intuitive with Overmind touch. Third line imaginative Poetic Intelligence. 2 "Imaginative Poetic Intelligence with something of the Higher Mind. 3 "Intuitive with Overmind ouch. 4 "Intuitive. 5 "Higher Mind with mental Overmind touch. 6 "Mixture of Higher and Illumined Mind—in the last line the mental Overmind touch. 7. "Illumined Mind with mental Overmind... gold throbbing on a silver hush. Nought save an ice pure peak of trance can bear The benediction of that aureole. SRI AUROBINDO'S COMMENT "It is very fine—it is the Higher Mind vision and movement throughout, except that in the fifth line a flash of Illumination comes through. Intense light-play and colour in this kind of utterance is usually the Illumined Mind's intervention ...
... Research, Vol. 10, No. 1, pp. 10-12.) Page 243 APPENDIX III (Selected Passages on Higher Mind, Illumined Mind, Intuition, Overmind and Supermind) Our first decisive step out of our human intelligence, our normal mentality, is an ascent into a higher Mind, a mind no longer of-mingled light and obscurity or half-light, but a large clarity of the Spirit. Its basic... As we go beyond the Higher Mind or what may also be called Truth-Thought, there is, according to Sri Aurobindo, a greater illumination instinct with an increased power and intensity and driving force, a luminosity of the nature of Truth-Sight with thought formulation as a minor and dependent activity. If, as Sri Aurobindo points out,, we may compare the action of the Higher Mind to a steady sun-shine... conceptive mental ideation, and it is natural that this leading power of our mentality should, when it goes beyond itself, pass into its immediate source....¹ ... The power of the spiritual Higher Mind and its idea-force, modified and diminished as it must be by its entrance into our mentality, is not sufficient to sweep out all these obstacles and create the gnostic being, but it can make a first ...
... radiant altitudes Exposed to the lustre of Infinity, Outskirts and dependencies of the house of Truth, Upraised estates of Mind and measureless. 12 Sight in the Higher Mind The Higher Mind is the first plane of spiritual mind-consciousness to which the first ascent out of four normal mentality takes us. This is a mind of automatic and spontaneous knowledge, knowledge... can be resolved into a stairway of four main ascents, each with its high level of fulfilment. These gradations may be summarily described as a series of sublimations of the consciousness through Higher Mind, Illumined Mind and Intuition into Overmind and beyond it; there is a succession of self-transmutations at the summit of which lies the Supermind or Divine Gnosis. 8 Now the ascending... progressive transformation as it mounts the ladder of the four-rung 'Spiritual Mind' series. We describe in a brief outline the nature of sight in each of the four levels represented by (i) the Higher Mind, (ii) the Illumined Mind, (iii) the Intuitive Mind, and (iv) the Overmind. But before that let us enjoy the rasa of a significant passage from Savitri: A vision came of higher realms ...
... if not a total, conversion of the being into a new light and power of a greater existence. The Life Divine, p. 938 (a) Higher Mind Our first decisive step out of our human intelligence, our normal mentality, is an ascent into a higher Mind, a mind no longer of mingled light and obscurity or half-light, but a large clarity of the Spirit. Its basic substance is a unitarian... can be resolved into a stairway of four main ascents, each with its high level of fulfilment. These gradations may be summarily described as a series of sublimations of the consciousness through Higher Mind, Illumined Mind and Intuition into Overmind and beyond it; there is a succession of self-transmutations at the summit of which lies the Supermind or Divine Gnosis. All these degrees Page... totality of truth known and experienced but still a totality capable of infinite enlargement because there is no end to the aspects of knowledge, n ā styanto vistarasya me. This is the Higher Mind in its aspect of cognition; but there is also the aspect of will, of dynamic effectuation of the Truth: here we find that this greater more brilliant Mind works always on the rest of the being ...
... draw it into themselves: most often their influence, when it does enter in, plays upon a Higher-Mind transfiguration of the mental Miltonic. Perhaps the Higher Mind is directly vocal in: Wild above rule or art, enormous bliss... 17 The Illumined Mind seems to put its own stamp on a Higher-Mind expression when we hear: Thou Sun, of this great world both eye and soul... 18 ... poetic word hailing from the Overmind is the Mantra. We have already spoken of its characteristics. Leading up to its source from the mental plane are the Higher Mind, the Illumined Mind, the Intuition. Unlike the Mind proper, the Higher Mind carries a natural awareness of the One Self everywhere and knows and sees through a lofty and comprehensive thought-force. It has "a strong tread often with... generally lacking in the spiritual depth of the overhead, his rhythm echoes the Higher Mind. Sri Aurobindo says: "When Milton starts his poem - Of Man's first disobedience and the fruit Of that forbidden Tree - he is evidently writing from the poetic intelligence. There is nothing of the Higher Mind knowledge or vision either in the substance or the style. But there is a largeness ...
... can be resolved into a stairway of four main ascents, each with its high level of fulfilment. These gradations may be summarily described as a series of sublimations of the consciousness through Higher Mind, Illumined Mind and Intuition into Overmind and beyond it; there is a succession of self-transmutations at the summit of which lies the Supermind or Divine Gnosis. All these degrees are gnostic in... forth from the superior status is enveloped and taken up into its own greater being and essence. Our first decisive step out of our human intelligence, our normal mentality, is an ascent into a higher Mind, a mind no longer of mingled light and obscurity or half-light, but a large clarity of the spirit. Its basic substance is a unitarian sense of being with a powerful multiple dynamisation capable... great totality of truth known and experienced but still a totality capable of infinite enlargement because there is no end to the aspects of knowledge, nāstyanto vistarasya me . This is the Higher Mind in its aspect of cognition; but there is also the aspect of will, of dynamic effectuation of the Truth: here we find that this greater more brilliant Mind works always on the rest of the being, the ...
... the wings of imagination, but still akin to the intellect proper, though exalted above it. The Higher Mind is a spiritual plane,—this does not answer to that description. But the larger poetic intelligence like the larger philosophic, though in a different cast of thinking, is nearer to the Higher Mind than the ordinary intellect and can more easily receive its influence. When Milton starts his... gold throbbing on a silver hush. Nought save an ice-pure peak of trance can bear The benediction of that aureole. Sri Aurobindo's Comment "It is very fine—it is the Higher Mind vision and movement throughout, except that in the fifth line a flash of Illumination comes through. Intense light-play and colour in this kind of utterance is usually the Illumined Mind's in... remarked about that line: "It is strong and dignified, but it impresses me as too mental and Miltonic. Milton has very usually—in 'Paradise Lost'—some of the largeness and rhythm of the Higher Mind, but his substance is, except at certain heights, mental—mentally grand and noble. The interference of this mental Miltonic is one of the great stumbling-blocks when one tries to write from 'above' ...
... altitudes Exposed to the luster of Infinity, Outskirts and dependencies of the house of Truth, Upraised estates of Mind and measureless." (659) (B.l) Sight in the Higher Mind : The Higher Mind is the first plane of spiritual mind-consciousness to which the ascent out of our normal mentality takes us. This is a mind of automatic and spontaneous knowledge, knowledge assuming... the 'Higher Mind' is not an acquired knowledge but a self-revelation of eternal Wisdom. For, we must not forget, "thought in itself, in its Page 59 origin on the higher levels of consciousness, is a perception, ... a powerful but ... secondary result of spiritual vision..." (The Life Divine, p. 945) Now a few Savitri verses depicting the sight in the Higher Mind: ... can be resolved into a stairway of four main ascents, each with its high level of fulfillment. These gradations may be summarily described as a series of sublimations of the consciousness through Higher Mind, Illumined Mind and Intuition into Overmind and beyond it; there is a succession of self-transmutations at the summit of which lies the Supermind or Divine Gnosis." (p. 938) Now the ascending ...
... thought when it comes to the mind. Higher Mind does not ratiocinate, does not think, does not proceed from no-knowledge to acquiring knowledge. In the Higher Mind knowledge comes down. That is its nature. There is no labour of speculation, no difficulty of thinking. Sri Aurobindo explains by giving an analogy. If you take sun as the aspect of the truth, the Higher Mind would be like steady sunshine coming... movement of what Sri Aurobindo calls the Higher Mind. The next higher layer will be that of the Illumined Mind; the third layer will be Intuitive Mind. The fourth will be Overmind, and Overmind directly puts one in contact with the Supermind. The movement of ascent from mind often begins by stopping all mental activity,— there is no thinking. In the Higher Mind, one does not reason as he does in the... cases. It might be only Intuition; it might be the Illumined Mind, it might be the Higher Mind. Overmind is very rare. Some operation of Overmind one may feel, but not the Overmind itself—Overmind itself is overwhelmingly wide. Q : Are there different stages of illumintion ? A : Yes, from mind you go to Higher Mind, the Illumined Mind, the Intuitive Mind and the Overmind. That's Page 259 ...
... called "the poetic intelligence" and more generally "the creative intelligence"? Can it be part also of "the Higher Mind" or "the Higher Thought" which is an "overhead" plane?) "It belongs to the poetic intelligence, but as in most of Milton it can be lifted up by the touch of the Higher Mind rhythm and language." 'There are besides in mental poetry derivations or substitutes for all ... dream. I woke to feel A human face yearnig out of the vast. SRI AUROBINDO'S COMMENT "It is very fine. The first three lines are the Higher Mind rising into the Illumined and are very powerful. The rest is of the Higher Mind, except it may be the two before the last which are somewhat mixed with the poetic intelligence." * PLEROMA Nor first nor last, but... is from the Intuitive, the rest not from the Higher Page 131 Mind—for there a high-uplifted thought is the characters tic—but more probably from some realm of the inner Mind where thought and vision are involved in each other—that kind of fusion gives the easy felicity that is found here. All the same there is a touch of the Higher Mind perhaps in the 2nd lines of the second and the ...
... light is the Higher Mind which is just above the ordinary human intelligence, the first of several planes of higher consciousness through which one has to pass in order to reach the Divine Truth. Something from your mind (thinking willing mind) is trying to rise up into the blue light of the Higher Mind so as to join and become one with it. There is one blue that is the higher mind, a deeper blue... another deeper blue that is of the Higher Mind; another, near to purple, which is the light of a power in the vital. Page 126 Blue Light Blue light, according to the shades, means several different things. If the blue lights [ seen in vision ] were of different shades it might mean the overhead planes, Overmind, Intuition, Illumined Mind, Higher Mind. The light from the higher... Aurobindo's light"—it is the blue light modified by the white light of the Mother. The snake form is a symbol of Energy and the white blue light may be that of the Mother's consciousness in the higher mind, or if it is not two separate colours but whitish blue then it is Sri Aurobindo's light. The light is a manifestation of Force, the nature of the force being indicated by the colour of the Light ...
... trance. SRI AUROBINDO'S COMMENT All the lines are very fine, especially those marked. The three first of each stanza have a great intensity of vision— Higher Mind plus Overmind Intuition touch. The last—Higher Mind plus Illumined Mind—is not equal in vision but still not too far below." (Is it a bad habit on my part or the natural movement of a certain type of inspiration... No transient pauper day but shadowless dawn, Eternal Truth's sun-gated infinite. SRI AUROBINDO'S COMMENT "It is mental throughout except the last line which has a touch of Higher Mind; but it is fine all the same. Quite up to the mark." * LOVE'S TRIUMPH O face of scorn, you winter not my will: This heart grew brighter when your breath's proud... lines rise out of the mental like islands out of the sea. Moreover, except in the lines marked with a cross where the illumined Mind gets strongly in, the 'note' is not quite pure,—there is the higher Mind tone, even a little of the illumined Mind, but not enough to make it absolutely that. It is a fine poem with very fine lines in it." * APOTHEOSIS Spurning the narrow cities ...
... An empty throne of gold awaiting us. SRI AUROBINDO'S COMMENT "It is more mental than usual--but the vision and expression are there. The first stanza is the most powerful, a Higher Mind movement; lines 7, 8 belong to the same category— though, as I say, the mental s rain is more pronounced than it has been in recent poems. The other lines are colourful and imaginative. ... soul: Then every stroke of time shall carve to birth Immortal moods lit by your ecstasy. SRI AUROBINDO'S COMMENT "Very fine poetry. Blank verse rhythm very good. Illumined Higher Mind." * Page 150 MERE OF DREAM The Unknown above is a mute vacancy— But in the mere of dream wide wings are spread, An ageless bird poising a rumour of... eye of thought-suspense An eagle-destiny beaconing through all time. SRI AUROBINDO'S COMMENT On an earlier version not including lines 5 and 6: "First line from the higher Mind, the next five from the illumined Mind—the last two I can't very well say: perhaps the inner Mind there has taken up the illumined inspiration and given it a turn belonging to an interpretative language ...
... distinguishable in the path of spiritual ascension, the path of ascent into the superconscient above the mind. These five planes are: the Higher Mind, the Illumined Mind, Intuitive Mind, Overmnid, and Supermind. Page 53 Higher Mind The Higher Mind is, according to Sri Aurobindo, a mind which is no longer subject to mingled light and obscurity or half-light. Its basic substance is a... beyond the Higher Mind or what may also be called Truth-Thought, there is, according to Sri Aurobindo, a greater illumination instinct with an increased power and intensity and driving force, a luminosity of the nature of Truth- Sight with thought formulation as a minor and dependent activity. If, as Sri Aurobindo points out, we may compare the Page 54 action of the Higher Mind to a steady... on the psychic or psycho-spiritual change. There is thus the necessity of an upward journey above our mind and an ascent of consciousness not only into the higher ranges of the superconscient Higher Mind, Illumined Mind and Intuitive Mind but also of Overmind and spiritual nature in which the sense of Self and Spirit is ever unveiled and permanent and in which the self-luminous instrumentation ...
... Is not the higher mind the first plane above our mind? That is right. It is the first of the planes above the ordinary human mind. Is the forehead (inner mind centre) a part of the higher mind? No, it indicates the mind generally. The higher mind is above. What is characteristic of the higher mind? It is a... it. This flight has many gradations. It is the line of connection between the spiritual mind, through higher mind, illumined mind, intuition, overmind to the supramental. For the last two days, my consciousness seems to soar much higher than the Higher Mind. Not only the inner but even the outer being feels elevated. Today especially I experienced as if the consciousness... forces is so strong and obstinate at present? What do you mean exactly by the intermediate zone? It is not likely that the attack is for preventing your rising above the higher Mind. It is rather probable that they want to prevent two things — first, your being permanently above in the Self and secondly the descent of the Force which should fill the Peace and Silence. ...
... of the divine life in humanity; for by that rending, by the illumining descent of the higher into the nature of the lower being and the forceful ascent of the lower being into the nature of the higher, mind can recover its divine light in the all-comprehending Supermind, the soul realise its divine self in the all-possessing all-blissful Ananda, life repossess its divine power in the play of omnipotent... of the stair of ascent: there are in it many steps... no gap anywhere... the gradation can be resolved into a stairway of four main ascents... a series of sublimation of the consciousness through Higher Mind, Illumined Mind and Intuition into Overmind and beyond it; there is a succession of self-transmutations at the summit of which lies the Supermind or Divine Gnosis. All these degrees are gnostic in... is therefore a general, if not a total, conversion of the being into a new light and power of a greater existence. 55 The steps of ascent or "slow gradations" between Mind and Supermind - Higher Mind, Illumined Mind, Intuition, Overmind - spiritual-mental powers, superconscient so far as mental man is concerned, but definitely below sovereign Supermind. In the Arya, Overmind was not mentioned; ...
... deities of the higher mind—Vishnu, Brahma, Siva—the three flames and forces of blue, white and red colours of the higher mind. They too like the Titan wanted only to utilise him instead of delivering him to their mother—Mahakali-Krishna, the Supramental. From this restraint and limitation too he has loosened himself away, he has proceeded even beyond the large precincts of the higher mind. And now... and less the dependence on himself and his powers, if he wishes to avoid dangers and pitfalls, which are innumerable on the way. THE SECRET OF THE PHYSICAL CONSCIOUSNESS Behind the higher mind, the mind,— manas , chitta—prana and body, there is the strength of the physical consciousness. The womb of physical consciousness is always in travail to bring out the Something that is behind... to enemy forces, it is with an obstinate intention finally to circumvent them and be their lord or victor. Behind this lower greyer mentality there is a greater and more luminous country—the higher mind. The beings of this region possess sufficient power to unsettle and overrule the workings of the Titan in part if not wholly, at times if not always; for a season hut not for ever. Here is found ...
... deities of the higher mind—Vishnu, Brahma, Siva—the three flames and forces of blue, white and red colours of the higher mind. They too like the Titan wanted only to utilise him instead of delivering him to their mother—Mahakali-Krishna, the Supramental. From this restraint and limitation too he has loosened himself away, he has proceeded even beyond the large precincts of the higher mind. And now... less the dependence on himself and his powers, if he wishes to avoid dangers and pitfalls, which are innumerable on the way. THE SECRET OF THE PHYSICAL CONSCIOUSNESS Behind the higher mind, the mind,— manas , chitta—prana and body, there is the strength of the physical consciousness. The womb of physical consciousness is always in travail to bring out the Something that is behind... enemy forces, it is with an obstinate intention finally to circumvent them and be their lord or victor. Behind this lower greyer mentality there is a greater and more luminous country—the higher mind. The beings of this region possess sufficient power to unsettle and overrule the workings of the Titan in part if not wholly, at times if not always; for a season hut not for ever. Here ...
... of the plane—if the poetry is nearer the Higher Mind than in the preceding passages where a more direct luminosity seemed to be at work. The former pitch continues, as far as I can see, up to "Light", then it begins to come down to an intuitivised higher mind in order to suit the change of the subject—but it is only occasionally that it is pure higher mind—a mixture of the intuitive or illumined... intelligence at its deepest, say, like a mixture of Sophocles and Virgil? They may be the pure or the intuitivised higher mind. I do not think it is the poetic intelligence any more than Virgil's Sunt lacrimae rerum et mentem mortalia tangunt , which I think to be the Higher Mind coming through to the psychic and blending with it. So also his O passi graviora, dabit deus his quoque finem . Here... worse for the rule. 30 October 1936 The poem was originally written from a lower level, a mixture perhaps of the inner mind, psychic, poetic intelligence, sublimised vital, afterwards with the Higher Mind, often illumined and intuitivised, intervening. Most of the stuff of the first book is new or else the old so altered as to be no more what it was; the best of the old has sometimes been kept almost ...
... As we go beyond the Higher Mind or what may also be called Truth-Thought, there is, according to Sri Aurobindo, a greater illumination instinct with an increased power and intensity and driving force, a luminosity of the nature of Truth- Sight with thought formulation as a minor and dependent activity. If, as Sri Aurobindo points out, we may compare the action of the Higher Mind to a steady sunshine... . VIII In the Yogic psychology of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother, the word 'superconscient' is used to include the planes beyond our present level of awareness, namely, those of the Higher Mind, Illumined Mind, Intuitive Mind, Overmind, Supermind, and the other heights of the pure spiritual being. A basic sense and knowledge of unity is the general characteristic of all the grades of the... can be remoulded and wholly transmuted. Each stage of this ascent is, therefore, a general, if not a total, conversion of the being into a new light and power of a greater existence.' ¹¹ The Higher Mind is a mind which is no longer subject to mingled light and obscurity or half-light. Its basic substance is a unitary sense of being with a powerful multiple dynamisation capable of the formation of ...
... Aurobindo speaks of various levels of mental existence above the ordinary mind. In an ascending order these are: Higher Mind: A first plane of spiritual consciousness white one becomes constantly aware of the Self. Whereas the ordinary mind is a thought-mind, the Higher Mind is a "luminous thought-mind, a mind of Spirit-born conceptual knowledge." 47 Page 95 Illumined Mind:... which we are accustomed; for there is nothing here of seeking, no trace of mental construction, no labour of speculation or difficult discovery; ir is an automatic and spontaneous knowledge from a Higher Mind that seems to be in possession of Truth and not in search of hidden and withheld realities. One observes that this Thought is much more capable than the mind of including at once a mass of knowledge... with thought formulation as a minor and dependent activity. If we accept the Vedic image of the Sun of Truth—an image which in this experience becomes a reality—we may compare the action of the Higher Mind to a composed and steady sunshine, the energy of the Illumined Mind beyond it Page 96 to an outpouring of massive lightnings of flaming sun-stuff. Still beyond can be met a yet greater ...
... of being are hidden in our own superconscious parts. In an ascending order the gradations of spiritualised mind are: Higher Mind: a luminous thought-mind whose instrumentation is through an elevated thought-power and comprehensive mental sight. In the Higher Mind one becomes constantly and closely aware of the Self, the One everywhere and knows and sees habitually with that awareness.... of the Spirit. Intuition: a power of consciousness nearer and more intimate than the above-mentioned gradations to the original knowlege by identity. What is thought-knowledge in the Higher Mind becomes illumination in the Illumined Mind and direct intimate vision in the Intuition. This true and authentic intuition must be distinguished from a power of the ordinary mental reason which... equally to the Spirit; but here it is veiled, closely, thickly, by its inferior self-expression of limiting mind, confining life and dividing body." — Sri Aurobindo Page 409 Higher Mind — see under Gradations between Mind and Supermind. hirạnmaya pā tra — golden lid. Horace —(65-08 BC) Latin poet. icchā-mṛtyu — the power of abandoning the body ...
... powers of being are hidden in our own superconscious parts. In an ascending order the gradations of spiritualised mind are: Higher Mind: a luminous thought-mind whose instrumentation is through an elevated thought-power and comprehensive mental sight. In the Higher Mind one becomes constantly and closely aware of the Self, the One everywhere and knows and sees habitually with that awareness. ... illumination of the Spirit. Intuition: a power of consciousness nearer and more intimate than the above-mentioned gradations to the original knowledge by identity. What is thought-knowledge in the Higher Mind becomes illumination in the Illumined Mind and direct intimate vision in the Intuition. This true and authentic intuition must be distinguished from a power of the ordinary mental reason which is... sness; the Overmind draws down the truths separately and gives them a separate identity. Guruvada —the doctrine that stresses the indispensability of the guru to the spiritual seeker. Higher Mind — see under gradations between mind and Supermind. the Ignorance —the consciousness of Multiplicity as distinguished from the Knowledge, the consciousness of Unity; a view of the reality based ...
... n, and series of ascents and descents. The first decisive step out of the human intelligence is, as we have seen, an ascent into the Higher Mind; but this ascent becomes more and more established when the aspect of cognition and the aspect of will of the higher mind impose Page 58 themselves by a process of integration and descent on our substance of Mind, Life and Matter. In order to... PART THREE Spiritual Experiences on the way to the Supermind On the way from the Quiet Mind and Silent Mind or Purified Mind, and while crossing from Higher Mind to the Supermind, several higher and penultimate spiritual experiences are attained. In the specialized systems of yoga these or some of them are felt to be so overwhelming that they seem to sublate... ascent but also of integration. It is in this context, therefore, that the evolutionary process pushes the development upwards from the silence of the mind to higher levels of the mind, such as the Higher Mind, Illumined Mind, Intuitive Mind and Overmind towards the Supermind. As Sri Aurobindo states: "But when the spiritualization begins and, as its greater results manifest themselves, — silence ...
... Spiritual Mind. Page 113 Illumined Mind, 10 Higher Mind, - a series running from greater to less knowledge until it lapses into the labouriously learning ignorance distinguishing the mental grade on which human beings live at present. Most in Overmind but definitely in even Higher Mind the consciousness is linked with the supramental Gnosis, "devolved from it"... it manifests. If at any stage it looks inferior to Higher Mind, it is something that can develop beyond it. Within its very initial form it contains, hidden like a miniature sun, the whole Supermind which escapes all Spiritual Mind and which the vastness of Overmind itself cannot comprise. What appears inferior in Light to even Higher Mind is the first peep of an effulgence before which the... of Spiritual Mind. In contrast, the initial form of the Mind of Light, for all its apparent inferiority to Higher Mind, has still not an iota of ignorance. The Light is less intense and immense in actual outburst, but it is perfectly clear. The mass-ideation of Higher Mind, the far-ranging colourful vision-glow of Illumined Mind, the piercing intimate ubiquitous lightning-seizures of ...
... birth to overhead poetry: they are "planes" whose afflatus comes as if from an Page 59 infinitude of conscious being above our brain-clamped mentality. Sri Aurobindo labels them Higher Mind, Illumined Mind, Intuition and Overmind. Above even Over-mind is the sovereign divine dynamism which he names Supermind and whose ultimate manifestation is the goal of his Integral Yoga. But Supermind... Word, the supreme revelatory speech of the Eternal. The characteristics of these levels will become clear in the course of reading the book. In brief they may be summed up as follows. The Higher Mind displays a broad steady light of thought born of a spiritual and not intellectual consciousness: the reflective terms do not exist in their own right but as immediate formations of That which, in... is self-contained, demonstrating a gradation of inspired speech; and, although a slight overlapping occurs, the parts mostly offer different aspects of that gradation. The first shows the Higher Mind, the Illumined Mind and the Intuition in their pure characters at work in whole short Page 61 pieces. It further shows a play of mixed inspiration, either raised to the pitch ...
... through the higher zones—higher Mind, illumined Mind, Intuition, Overmind, is obligatory—they are the true Intermediaries between the present consciousness and the Supermind. 28 December 1933 About the intermediate zone, you wrote [in the preceding letter]: "One is not in possession of or direct contact with the divine Truth on its own levels." Are the planes of Higher Mind or Intuition in direct... a confused condition or passage in which one is getting out of the personal consciousness and opening into the cosmic (cosmic Mind, cosmic vital, cosmic physical, something perhaps of the cosmic higher Mind) without having yet transcended the human mind levels. One is not in possession of or direct contact with the divine Truth on its own levels , but one can receive something from them, even from... as an Avatar or lose balance like Hridaya with Ramakrishna" [pp. 15-16]. Can the Jivatman status be realised before vital egoism is abolished? One can get the knowledge or perception in the higher mind "I am That" while the vital is still untransformed,—then the vital ego can take it up and give it a wrong application. How can one go so far as to think of oneself as an Avatar? Is it because ...
... that. The higher mind would simply recognise the mistake and correct it. Is the higher mind a part of the intellect—the higher part? The higher mind is a thing in itself above the intellect. — It is only when something of its power comes down and is modified in the lower mind substance that it acts as part of the intellect. Are the inner mind and higher mind and Over-mind ...
... '¹ Supermind is, according to Sri Aurobindo, a grade of existence beyond, mind, life and Matter. And, between Mind and Supermind are the intermediate grades which Sri Aurobindo has termed the 'Higher Mind', 'Illumined Mind', 'Intuitive Page 23 Mind', and 'Overmind'.² The Supermind is an eternal reality of the divine Being and divine Nature. In the words of Sri Aurobindo, 'A Supramental... to Sri Aurobindo, there is to be an ascent into the planes of the higher dynamic action and the descent of the powers of these planes into our mind, life and body. These planes are those of the Higher Mind, Illumined Mind, Intuitive Mind, and Overmind preparing the ascent and descent of the Supermind.13 It is this process that is specifically called in the Yoga of Sri Aurobindo the process of spiritual... subject, but in the following passage from one of his letters, we have some indications of this process: 'The Self governs the diversity of its creation by its unity of all the planes from the Higher Mind upwards on which the realisation of the one is the natural basis of consciousness. But as one goes upward, the view changes, the power of consciousness changes, the Light becomes ever more intense ...
... Aurobindo's description of their working. I. THE HIGHER MIND. "The poetic intelligence is quite different; it is the mind and its vision moving on the wings of imagination akin to the intellect proper but lifted above it. The Higher Mind is a spiritual plane, this is not."—Letters, Vol. III Page 258 "In the Higher Mind we are aware of a sealike downpour of masses of a s... Life Divine. "The Higher Mind is the first plane where one becomes aware of the Self, the One everywhere and knows and sees things through an elevated thought-power and comprehensive mental sight—not illumined by any of the intense or upper lights but as in a large strong and clear daylight".— Letters, Vol. III. To the question; how does the Higher Mind differ from the ordinary Mind... reality,— we may compare the action of the Higher Mind to a composed and steady sunshine".— Life Divine. "This higher consciousness is a knowledge formulating itself on a basis of self-existent all-awareness and manifesting some part of its integrality, a harmony of its significances put into thought-form".-— Life Divine. The Higher Mind has "clarity of spiritual intelligence and ...
... vastnesses of leafy rapture. Ditto with something of the higher Mind. The mute unshadowed spaces of her mind. Intuitive with overmind touch. A sea unheard where spume nor spray is blown. Intuitive. Irradiant wing-waft through eternal space, Pride of lone rapture and invincible sun-gaze. Higher Mind with mental overmind touch. Born nomad of the infinite... P.S. Higher mind throughout, illumined. 10 October 1936 I understand your objection to "vasty region" ... though I don't know if Milton ever used "vasty". It is a Shakespearean word, a famous instance being in that line about calling "spirits from the vasty deep".... I am describing, of course, the Overmind, but does the fact that the poem is only from the Higher Mind, however illumined... Paradise Lost ) some of the largeness and rhythm of the higher mind, but his substance except at certain heights is mental, mentally grand and noble. The interference of this mental Miltonic is one of the great stumbling-blocks when one tries to write from "above". 17 November 1936 [ after revision ] It is very fine now—it is the higher mind vision and movement throughout, except that in the ...
... knowledge. The Higher Mind The higher mind is a thing in itself above the intellect. It is only when something of its power comes down and is modified in the lower mind substance that it acts as part of the intellect. It depends on what is meant by the higher buddhi—whether you use the word to mean the higher part of the intellect or the higher Mind. The higher Mind in itself on its own... inspiration comes. The Illumined Mind Intuition is above illumined Mind—which is simply higher Mind raised to a great luminosity and more open to modified forms of intuition and inspiration. The substance of knowledge is the same [ in the higher mind and the illumined mind ], but the higher mind gives only the substance and form of knowledge in thought and word—in the illumined mind there... The Higher Planes and Higher Consciousness The higher planes are the higher mind, illumined, intuitive, over mind, supermind. The psychic, mind, vital, physical belong to the ordinary manifestation. The planes and the body are not the same. Above the head are seen all the planes from the overmind down to the higher mind, but this is only a correlation in the consciousness—not an actual location ...
... named by Sri Aurobindo: Overmind, Intuition, Illumined Mind and Higher Mind. Together they make up a region which contains the possible gradations of consciousness of the transitional beings whom Sri Aurobindo called “the new humanity”. Overmind (which is the level of the worlds of the gods), Intuition, Illumined Mind and Higher Mind still exist in the Light of the Supermind, they are, in that order... of this ascent is therefore a general, if not a total, conversion of the being into a new light and power of a greater existence.” 39 Higher Mind: “Our first decisive step out of our human intelligence, our normal mentality, is an ascent into a higher Mind, a mind no longer of mingled light and obscurity or half-light, but a large clarity of the Spirit. Its basic substance is a Unitarian sense... “There is further limitation or change of characteristic action at each step downwards from Overmind to Intuition, from Intuition to Illumined Mind, from Illumined Mind to what I have called the Higher Mind”, writes Sri Aurobindo. 28 The Absolute is Light, the Inconscient is darkness. Light and darkness in this case are much more than poetic epithets, they are realities. The substances of the ...
... is nowhere any real gulf, always there are connecting gradations and one can ascend from step to step. 43 Higher Mind Higher mind is the first and lowest of the superconscient planes above the level of the ordinary mind. I mean by the Higher Mind a first plane of spiritual consciousness where one becomes constantly and closely aware of the Self, the One everywhere... gradations of consciousness below and above mental consciousness — the level with which we are most familiar as human beings. The Inconscient, the Subconscient, the Physical, the Vital, Mind, Higher Mind, Illumined Mind, Intuition, Overmind, Supermind and Sachchidananda constitute the chief levels of consciousness in the vertical system (Fig.2). Page 337 Evolution of Con... be resolved into a stairway of four main ascents, each with its high level of fulfilment. These gradations may be summarily described as a series of sublimations of the consciousness through Higher Mind, Illumined Mind and Intuition into Overmind and beyond it; there is a succession of self-transmutations at the summit of which lies the Supermind or Divine Gnosis. 42 There are many ...
... inspiration: Higher Mind with some colour of Illumination and just touched by Overmind Intuition—a faultless movement of vision and colour, all welded together into a harmonious whole. The next two rise still more to an extraordinary lofty inspiration (Illumined Mind with he Overmind touch)—and present a most profoundly suggestive spiritual picture. The last two are very high up in the higher Mind—-just the... perfect—it is all of one piece, an exceedingly fine poem expressing with revelatory images the consciousness of the cosmic Self into which one enters by breaking the walls of individual limitation. Higher Mind, touched with Illumined Mind, except lines 3, 4, 8, 9 which are more of the illumined Mind itself." Asked what exactly was meant in line 3 by the phrase "that breaks through form", Sri Aurobindo... fragrant with eternity— Eagles of rapture lifting fliekerless A golden trance wide-winged on golden air. Page 87 SRI AUROBINDO'S COMMENT "It comes from the higher mind except for the third and seventh lines which have illumination and are very fine." * THROUGH VESPER'S VEIL A rose of fire like a secret smile Won from the heart of ...
... a Truth can the higher mind and the illumined mind give at one time? There is no fixed number of sides. In fact the attempt to put such rules and limitations and to define the field of these higher things is useless; such an attempt is mental and ceases to have any meaning as one goes upward. What is the difference between the knowledge of the higher mind and that of the... mind is active, while on the other the useful recording mind has fallen completely silent. It cannot do any thinking or even recording of the experiences! Perhaps it is waiting for a higher mind to act from above. My mental control seems to have been removed completely. So I miss the service of my mind proper (the intellect). I think, act, write only with the physical mind... Force pass there. From where does the higher knowledge descend - the knowledge that gives Truth? As for the knowledge in Yoga it comes first from the higher Page 199 mind, but even that does not see the whole Truth, only sides of it. What are these sides? How many sides has the higher Truth? You will have to let it develop ...
... draw it into themselves: most often their influence, when it does enter in, plays upon a Higher-Mind transfiguration of the mental Miltonic. Perhaps the Higher Mind is directly vocal in: Wild above rule or art, enormous bliss... 2 The Illumined Mind seems to put its own stamp on a Higher-Mind expression when we hear: Thou Sun, of this great world both eye and soul... 3 ... poetic word hailing from the Overmind is the Mantra. We have already spoken of its characteristics. Leading up to its source from the mental plane are the Higher Mind, the Illumined Mind, the Intuition. Unlike the Mind proper, the Higher Mind carries a natural awareness of the One Self everywhere and knows and sees through a lofty and comprehensive thought-force. It has "a strong tread often with... generally lacking in the spiritual depth of the overhead, his rhythm echoes the Higher Mind. Sri Aurobindo says: "When Milton starts his poem - Of Man's first disobedience and the fruit Of that forbidden Tree - he is evidently writing from the poetic intelligence. There is nothing of the Higher Mind knowledge or vision either in the substance or the style. But there is a largeness ...
... outsides and it harmonises, too, readily — provided we keep intuitively awake — with whatever fresh truth has yet to arrive." 17 Mind and Higher Mind Between the Mind and the Intuitive Mind, there are two layers, — those of the Higher Mind and Illumined Mind. The ordinary human mind is conceptual in character, and even at its highest levels, when it conceives of comprehensiveness... explains very briefly in one of his letters how the Self governs the diversity by means of unity as one ascends from the higher mind upwards, where the realization of the one is the natural basis of consciousness. That sense of unity and oneness is common on all the planes from higher mind upwards, but what is new at every level of higher consciousness is the degree and kind of power of consciousness and... concentration that is upward, which presses on the summits of the mind and which breaks the lid of the mind so as to liberate our consciousness into the domains of superconscience, the levels of the higher mind, illumined mind, intuitive mind and overmind, which ultimately leads to the Supermind. In the yogic terminology of the integral yoga these two concentrations are termed as concentrations on (i) the ...
... radiant altitudes Exposed to the lustre of Infinity, Outskirts and dependencies of the house of Truth, Upraised estates of Mind and measureless. 12 Sight in the Higher Mind The Higher Mind is the first plane of spiritual mind-consciousness to which the first ascent out of four normal mentality takes us. This is a mind of automatic and spontaneous knowledge, knowledge... to the earth... The entire second Book is, in fact, Aswapati's travel over worlds heaped upon worlds in a complex cosmogony mounting from the plinth of the plane of Matter right up to levels of higher Mind and the plane of the Cosmic Being leading to worlds of greater Knowledge. Aswapati represents the aspiring human soul down the millenniums of evolution in his search for the truth of himself,... 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 their ascending order: (i) the Higher Mind; (ii) the Illumined Mind; (iii) the Intuitive Mind; (iv) the Overmind; and finally (v) the Supermind or Gnosis, this last being the plane of absolute and everlasting Light, that transcends altogether ...
... like a vast moon upon the deep. SRI AUROBINDO'S COMMENT 'A very fine poem, lines 1, 4 are from the Illumined Higher Mind. The second comes very splendidly from the Illumined Mind, the third is Higher Mind at a high level. The fifth comes from the I higher Mind—the sixth, seventh and eighth from the Illumined Mind touched with something from the Overmind Intuition, though the touch is... profound That never human grief can overthrow. SRI AUROBINDO'S COMMENT "It is quite up to the mark—very fine. Higher Mind, I think , with lines 6 and 7 raised up to what might be called (if we must find a name for these combinations) Higher Mind Intuition. There are various combinations possible, as in the process of sublimation each higher plane infuses itself into those below... S COMMENT "A very fine poem throughout. The 2nd and 3rd lines are from the Illumined Mind. The first from the Higher Mind—the fourth is in substance from the Illumined Mind but there is a mental rhythm—very good and expressive rhythm, no doubt. The rest is the Higher Mind with touch of Illumination and Intuition—The last three lines are the Illumined Mind with Overmind Intuition touch, extremely ...
... which is the beginning of the higher hemisphere of existence, the seeker will go through several mental layers or worlds, which Sri Aurobindo has respectively called, in ascending order, the higher mind, the illumined mind, the intuitive mind, and the overmind. We may of course use a different terminology, but these four zones correspond to very specific experiences, verifiable by anyone who has... the ascent. Theoretically, these four zones of consciousness belong to the Superconscient. We say theoretically , because the superconscious threshold varies with individuals: for some, the higher mind or even the illumined mind is not superconscious, but a normal part of their waking consciousness, while for others, the mere reasoning mind is still a remote possibility of inner development; in... obscure gravitation; we cannot bear joy, or pain, for too long, cannot bear too much light; everything is small, spasmodic, soon quenched. And everything is subject to a thousand conditions. b) The Higher Mind This new degree is frequently found in philosophers and thinkers. It is less opaque, freer. The background is no longer so gray, or there is a bluish tinge to it, and the little descending bursts ...
... take up the Overhead powers and give some idea of each in Sri Aurobindo's words : The Higher Mind: " The poetic intelligence is quite different; it is the mind and its vision moving on the wings of imagination akin to the intellect proper but lifted above it. The Higher Mind is a spiritual plane." "In the Higher Mind we are aware of a sealike downpour of masses of a spontaneous knowledge which assumes... Sun of Truth-an image which in this experience becomes a reality, we may compare the action of the Higher Mind to a compact and steady Sunshine."6 One characteristic of the Higher Mind is " totality of truth-seeing at a single view." Illumined Mind : " Beyond this Truth-Thought (i. e. Higher Mind ) we can distinguish a greater illumination instinct with an increased power and intensity and driving... that all the overhead planes are not to be classed together, there are gradations of them. "These gradations may be summarily described as a series of sublimations of the consciousness through Higher Mind, Illumined Mind and Intuition into overmind and beyond it; there is a succession of self-transmutations at the summit of which lies the Supermind or Divine Gnosis"². It is possible to mistake ...
... The Sources of Poetry Letters on Poetry and Art Overhead Poetry Higher Mind and Poetic Intelligence I mean by the Higher Mind a first plane of spiritual [consciousness] where one becomes constantly and closely aware of the Self, the One everywhere and knows and sees things habitually with that awareness; but it is still very much on the mind level although... on the wings of imagination, but still akin to the intellect proper, though exalted above it. The Higher Mind is a spiritual plane,—this does not answer to that description. But the larger poetic intelligence like the larger philosophic, though in a different cast of thinking, is nearer to the Higher Mind than the ordinary intellect and can more easily receive its influence. When Milton starts his poem... but he is not the greater poet. 19 October 1936 Higher Mind and Inner Mind When I say that the inner Mind can get the tinge or reflection of the higher experience I am not speaking here of the "descent" in Yoga by which the higher realisation can come down into the inferior planes and enlighten or transform them. I mean that the Higher Mind is itself a spiritual plane and one who lives in it ...
... the psychic mind. The Mind Proper Above the physical mind and the vital mind is the mental intelligence, the mind proper. Beyond the ordinary thinking mind or intellect is the higher mind; beyond the higher mind is the illumined mind and beyond that is the intuitive mind. Above the intuitive mind are the Intuition and the Overmind. The Mind proper is divided into three parts—thinking Mind... It is that and the mechanical that last longest, but these too fall silent when the peace and silence become massive and complete. Afterwards knowledge begins to come from the higher planes—the Higher Mind to begin with, and this creates a new action of thought and perception which replaces the ordinary mental. Page 183 It does that first in the thinking mind, but afterwards also in the ...
... and psychic and above to higher mind and higher consciousness generally, then it begins to be spiritualised and its highest ranges merge into the spiritual mind-consciousness of which this higher mind can be a beginning. This merging is part of the spiritual transformation. For the mind there are many centres: (1) the sahasradala which centralises spiritual mind, higher mind, intuitive mind and acts ...
... other consciousnesses above the mind—e.g. the higher mind, intuition, overmind etc. Akasha as the ether indicates also the infinite. The sky in the heart is the chidakash. It is seen usually above the head, but when it is seen in the heart, that means the opening of the heart to the higher consciousness. The blue sky is that of the Higher Mind—the nearest of the planes between human mentality... mentality and the Supermind. The moon here [ in a vision ] is the symbol of spirituality in the mental planes. The world of the Higher Mind is above those directly connected with the body consciousness. The higher consciousness on any of its levels is seen usually as a sky or ether, but when felt through the vital it is often perceived as a sea. Sat, Chit, Ananda, Supermind, Mind, Life, ...
... eye of thought-suspense An eagle-destiny beaconing through all time. Sri Aurobindo's Comment On an earlier version not including lines 5 and 6: "First line from the higher Mind, the next five from the illumined Mind—the last two I can't very well say: perhaps the inner Mind there has taken up the illumined inspiration and given it a turn belonging to an interpretative... gains by the two lines added; the line about the veils of vastitude being on the general level of the first four and even on the specially high level of 2 and 4. 6 is also a fine line (illumined higher Mind)." "The poem does not fall below the average mark [you have set yourself], but there are degrees even in the above-average and this is fine, even very fine, but not as a whole quite as ... fused into a fine intuitive authenticity and beauty, there is seldom anything to change; (3) a higher level of grander movement and language in which you pull down or reach the influences of the Higher Mind, Illumined Mind, Over-mind Intuition. The last you have not yet fully mastered so as to write with an absolute certainty and faultlessness except by lines and stanzas or else as a whole in rare ...
... as having acted so far in the world's literature on a few occasions: higher mind, illumined mind, intuition, overmind. On all these planes the experience of the Infinite is automatic, and there is a light of direct knowledge of the universe's fundamental being and becoming. But the light varies in intensity. The higher mind is like a broad clear day revealing 9. Letters of Sri ... breathing one or another level beyond the mind, either distinctly or in combination, and everywhere a lift towards the mantra, culminating now and again in that sovereign speech itself. The higher mind inspiration passes distinctly through The huge foreboding mind of Night, alone and mixes with that of the illumined mind in An eye of deity pierced through the dumb deeps ...
... with calm the body's blinded cry — A soul of upright splendour like the noon! Here we are straining beyond the Poetic Intelligence and even the second tier of the overhead ascent, for the Higher Mind which has seized the mental imagination is itself linking its largeness of thought to a wideness of sight proper to the Illumined Mind. Sri Aurobindo has read a capture of the spiritual-mental... be spotted though in different proportions: Page 397 Rapt above earth by power of one fair face... Sri Aurobindo has opined about its mixed source: "Difficult to say. More of Higher Mind perhaps than anything else — but something of illumination and intuition also." I should point out that in reading this line one has to pronounce the preposition "above" with a shift of its usual... There is a crescendo in the uplift of the expression. The opening phrase may be considered the Poetic Intelligence's forceful clarity bordering on the Higher Mind's expansive vision and then the Higher Mind itself comes into full action with its wide rhythmic sweep breaking, as it were, beyond into something yet intenser by means of the last word — "ever" — which exceeds the pentameter span by a syllable ...
... another outstanding example of a similar phenomenon, of the descent of light into human consciousness. The light that descended into human consciousness at the time of the Renaissance captured the higher mind and intelligence – the Ray touched as it were the frontal lobe of the brain; the later descent touched the heart, the feelings and emotive sensibility, it evoked more vibrant, living and powerful... and reason: it included a strong and balanced body (both body natural and body politic) under the aegis of mens sana (a sound mind). The light that was Greece was at its zenith a power of the higher mind and intelligence, intuitively dynamic in one – the earlier –phase through Plato, Pythagoras, Heraclitus and the mystic philosophers, and discursively and scientifically rational through the Aristotelian... dogmatism. We may follow a little more closely the march of the centuries in their undulating movement. The creative intelligence of the Renaissance too belonged to a region of the higher mind, a kind of inspirational mind. It had not the altitude or even the Page 211 depth of the Greek mind nor its subtler resonances : but it regained and re-established and carried to ...
... another outstanding example of a similar phenomenon, of the descent of light into human consciousness. The light that descended into human consciousness at the time of the Renaissance captured the higher mind and intelligence— the Ray touched as it were the frontal lobe of the brain; the later descent touched the heart, the feelings and emotive sensibility, it evoked more vibrant, living and powerful... and reason: it included a strong and balanced body (both body natural and body politic) under the aegis of mens sana (a sound mind). The light that was Greece was at its zenith / a power of the higher mind and intelligence, intuitively dynamic in one—the earlier—phase through Plato, Pythagoras, Heraclitus and the mystic philosophers, and discursively and scientifically rational through the Aristotelian... deduction and dogmatism. We may follow a little more closely the march of the centuries in their undulating movement. The creative intelligence of the Renaissance too belonged to a region of the higher mind, a kind of inspirational mind. It had not the altitude or even the Page 101 depth of the Greek mind nor its subtler resonances : but it regained and re-established and carried to a ...
... described by Sri Aurobindo. The first one nearest to the Overmind and the least contaminated by the Mind is pure Intuition; next, the intermediary one is called the Illumined Mind, and last comes the Higher Mind. They are all powers of the Overmind functioning in the Mind. The higher ranges are always more direct, intense, synthetic, dynamic than the lower ones where consciousness is slower, duller, more... plant. Life is in its original pristine mode; in the animal, it has become sentient and centralised Page 39 round a rudimentary desire-soul; in man, life-force is taken upby the higher mind and intelligence giving birth to idealism and ambition, dynamisms of a forward-looking purposive will. We have, till now, spoken of the evolution of consciousnessas a movement of ascension,... in his normal mental consciousness. But there is the possibility of growth and evolution and transformation of personality in higher and higher spiritual degrees through the upper reaches of the higher Mind, the varying degrees of the Overmind and finally the Supermind. These are the spheres, the fields, even the continents of the personality, but the stuff, the substance of the personality, the inner ...
... described by Sri Aurobindo. The first one nearest to the Overmind and the least contaminated by the Mind is pure Intuition; next, the intermediary one is called the Illumined Mind, and last comes the Higher Mind. They are all powers of the Overmind functioning in the Mind. The higher ranges are always more direct, intense synthetic, dynamic than the lower ones where Page 24 consciousness... transformation. In the plant, Life is in its original pristine mode; in the animal, it has become sentient and centralised round a rudimentary desire-soul; in man, life-force is taken up by the higher mind and intelligence giving birth to idealism and ambition, dynamisms of a forward-looking purposive will. We have, till now, spoken of the evolution of consciousness as a movement of ascension... in his normal mental consciousness. But there is the possibility of growth and evolution and transformation of personality in higher and higher spiritual degrees through the upper reaches of the higher Mind, the varying degrees of Overmind and finally the Supermind. These are the spheres, the fields, even the continents of the personality, but the stuff, the substance of the personality, the inner nucleus ...
... series of sublimations of the consciousness through Higher Mind, Illumined Mind and Intuition into Overmind and beyond it; there is a succession of self-transmutations at the summit of which lies the Supermind or Divine Gnosis. Sri Aurobindo The Life Divine - II: The Ascent towards Supermind Higher Mind I mean by the Higher Mind a first plane of spiritual [consciousness] where one... Sri Aurobindo Letters on Yoga - IV: The Subconscient and the Integral Yoga The higher consciousness is that above the ordinary mind and different from it in its workings; it ranges from higher mind through illumined mind, intuition and overmind up to the border line of the supramental. Sri Aurobindo Letters on Yoga - I: Classification of the Parts of the Being In this higher con... knowledge in a form that the Mind intensified, broadened, made spiritually supple, can receive without being blinded or dazzled by a Truth beyond it. Sri Aurobindo Letters on Poetry and Art: Higher Mind and Poetic Intelligence Illumined Mind … greater Force is that of the Illumined Mind, a Mind no longer of higher Thought, but of spiritual light. Here the clarity of the spiritual in ...
... powers of being are hidden in our own super-conscious parts. In an ascending order the gradations of spiritualised mind are: Higher Mind: a luminous thought-mind whose instrumentation is through an elevated thought-power and comprehensive mental sight. In the Higher Mind one becomes constantly and closely aware of the Self, the One everywhere and knows and sees habitually with that awareness. ... truth of things. Dharma — law; the deepest law of one's nature; the right law of individual and social life; literally, that which one lays hold of and which holds things together. Higher Mind — see under spiritualised mind. inner mind — that which lies behind the surface mind (our ordinary mentality); this inner or subliminal mind senses directly all the things of the mind-plane... g the ordinary mind, hidden in our own superconscient parts, there are higher ranges of Mind, gradations of spiritualised mind leading beyond mind to the Supermind. In ascending order they are: Higher Mind, Illumined Mind, Intuition and Overmind. Nature — the outer or executive side of the Conscious Force which forms and moves the worlds. The higher, divine Nature (Para Prakriti) is free from ...
... includes the higher planes of mind—Higher Mind, Illumined Mind, Intuition and Overmind—as well as what is beyond mind, namely, Supermind and the Supreme Reality called Sachchidananda (Existence-Consciousness-Bliss). These superconscient gradations of consciousness are here briefly described in Sri Aurobindo's words. Higher Mind "I mean by the Higher Mind a first plane of spiritual consciousness... also beyond mind and radically different from it. It is beyond and different not only in relation to the ordinary mind but also in comparison with the superconscient planes of mind, namely, Higher Mind, Illumined Mind, Intuition and Overmind. For whereas all these superconscient planes of mind are blends of light and darkness, Knowledge-Ignorance, Supermind is the Truth-Consciousness, totally devoid... Yoga - I: The Subconscient and the Inconscient × Sri Aurobindo, Letters on Poetry and Art: Higher Mind and Poetic Intelligence × Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine - II: The Ascent towards Supermind ...
... action or a perfect guidance. But when the vital is in contact with the higher mind, it is possible for it to be guided by a greater light and knowledge, by a higher intuition and inspiration, a truer discrimination and some revelations of the divine truth and the divine will. This obedience of the vital to the psychic and the higher mind is the beginning of the outgoing of the Yogic consciousness in its... dynamic for the change of the whole nature down to the most physical and for the bringing down of the divine consciousness into earth matter. When it not only touches the psychic but fuses with the higher mind, it is able to come into contact with and obey a greater light and knowledge. Ordinarily, the vital is either moved by the human mind and governed by its more or less ignorant dictates, or takes... its dynamic action upon life. But this, too, is not sufficient for the divine life. To come into contact with the higher mind consciousness is not enough, it is only an indispensable stage. There must be a descent of the Divine Force from yet loftier and more powerful reaches. A transformation of the higher consciousness into a supramental light and power, a transformation of the vital and its life-force ...
... consciousness is that above the ordinary mind and different from it in its workings; it ranges from higher mind through illumined mind, intuition and overmind up to the border line of the supramental. The Self governs the diversity of its creation by its unity on all the planes from the Higher Mind upwards, for there some realisation or vision of the One Truth or the Universal is the natural frame... be all on the immediate step—whatever is being done at the time. So have the working of the Power and let it work all out step by step. Levels of the Higher Mind What you see is perfectly correct. These three are three levels of the higher Mind—on the lowest the consciousness is in connection with the Divine not directly but through the touch of the Light, Peace, Power and Knowledge, on the second... done. All possible forms and constructions of things become more and more visible, more perfectly put in their proper place, more luminously utilisable. A clear spacious thought-knowledge in the Higher Mind becomes a mass of illuminations in the Illumined Mind and heightens into direct intimate vision on the Intuition level. But the Intuition sees in flashes and combines through a constant play of light ...
... 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 apar ā rdha or the lower hemisphere of existence. The Higher Mind is the first plane of spiritual mind-consciousness to which... 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... 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 ...
... or a perfect guidance. But when the Vital is in contact with the higher mind, it is possible for it to be guided by a greater light and knowledge, by a higher intuition and inspiration, a truer discrimination and some revelations of the divine truth and the divine will. This obedience of the vital to the. psychic and the higher mind is the beginning of the outgoing of the Yogic consciousness in its... dynamic for the change of the whole nature down to the most physical and for the bringing down of the divine consciousness into earth matter. When it not only touches the psychic but fuses with the higher mind, it is able to come into contact with and obey a greater light and knowledge. Ordinarily, the vital is either moved by the human mind and governed by its more or less ignorant dictates, or takes... its dynamic action upon life. But this too is not Sufficient for the divine life. To come into contact With the higher mind consciousness is not enough, it is only an indispensable stage. There must be a descent of the Divine Force from yet loftier and more powerful reaches. A transformation of the higher consciousness into a supramental light and power, a transformation of the vital and ...
... inner mind is not the higher mind; it is more in touch with the universal forces and more open to the higher consciousness and capable of an immensely deeper and larger range of action than the outer or surface mind—but it is of the same essential nature. The higher consciousness is that above the or dinary mind and different from it in its workings; it ranges from higher mind through illumined mind... at each stage of the ascent there is a conversion into a new consciousness and an infusion of this new consciousness into the whole of the nature. Thus rising beyond intellect through illuminated higher mind to the intuitive consciousness, we begin to look at everything not from the intellect range or through intellect as an instrument, but from a greater intuitive height and through an intuitivised... liberated from this covering, then it can act according to its own nature with a free aspiration, a direct contact with the higher consciousness and a power to change the ignorant nature. Higher Mind is one of the planes of the spiritual mind, the first and lowest of them; it is above the normal mental level. Inner mind is that which lies behind the surface mind (our ordinary mentality) and can ...
... have in the Overmind itself on its native levels. Most of the movements come not from the Overmind, but down from higher mind ranges. The ideas with which these experiences are penetrated and on which they seem to rest their claim to truth are not of the Overmind, but of the higher Mind or sometimes of the illumined Mind; but they are mixed with suggestions from the lower mind and vital regions and... a confused condition or passage in which one is getting out of the personal consciousness and opening into the cosmic (cosmic Mind, cosmic vital, cosmic physical, something perhaps of the cosmic higher Mind) without having yet transcended the human mind levels. One is not in possession of or direct contact with the divine Truth on its own levels , but one can receive something from them, even from... rapidly and directly or with a minimum of trouble into the higher zones of consciousness where one is in direct contact with the Divine Truth. On the other hand the passage through the higher zones—higher Mind, illumined Mind, Intuition, Overmind—is obligatory; they are the true Intermediaries between the present consciousness and the Supermind. All these experiences are of the same nature and what ...
... but by an insistence from the higher mind on the lower, an insistence on right for its own sake, on imperative moral values, on an absolute law and truth of ethical being and ethical conduct that must be obeyed whatever the recalcitrances of the lower mind, whatever the pains of the vital problem, whatever the external result, the inferior issue. This higher mind holds its pure and complete sway... less than the ethical motive, no longer a seeking and necessity of this relative nature and importance, but a law and call to spiritual perfection, an inner and absolute divine imperative. The higher mind of man seeks not only after good, but after truth, after knowledge. He has an intellectual as well as an ethical being and the impulse that moves it, the will to know, the thirst for truth is not... success. Intelligence pays its way in the material world, guards itself against vital and physical suffering, secures its vital rewards more surely than moral right and ethical purpose. But the higher mind of humanity is no more content with a utilitarian use of knowledge as its last word in the seeking of the intelligence than with a vitalistic and utilitarian turn and demand of the ethical being ...
... rarest of those levels give birth to overhead poetry: they are "planes" whose afflatus comes as if from an infinitude of conscious being above our brain-clamped mentality. Sri Aurobindo labels them Higher Mind, Illumined Mind, Intuition and Overmind. Above even Overmind is the sovereign divine dynamism which he names Supermind and whose ultimate manifestation is the goal of his Integral Yoga.... Word, the supreme revelatory speech of the Eternal. The characteristics of these levels will become clear in the course of reading the book. In brief they may be summed up as follows. The Higher Mind displays a broad steady light of thought born of a spiritual and not intellectual consciousness: the reflective terms do not exist in their own right but as immediate formations of That which, in... is self-contained, demonstrating a gradation of inspired speech; and, although a slight overlapping occurs, the parts mostly offer different aspects of that gradation. The first shows the Higher Mind, the Illumined Mind and the Intuition in their pure characters at work in whole short pieces. It further shows a play of mixed inspiration, either raised to the pitch of the Overmind or plumbing ...
... the border has been crossed, there is no more 'ascent' and 'descent'; you have the feeling of rising up only at the very start, while leaving the terrestrial consciousness and emerging into the higher mind. But once you have gone beyond that, there's no notion of rising; there's a sense, instead, of a sort of inner transformation.² *** In his magnum opus, The Life Divine, Sri Aurobindo has... to Sri Aurobindo, there is to be an ascent into the planes of the higher dynamic action and the descent of the powers of these planes into our mind, life and body. These planes are those of the Higher Mind, Illumined Mind, Intuitive Mind, and Overmind. It is this process that is specifically called in the Yoga of Sri Aurobindo the process of spiritual transformation. This process is extremely... subject,¹ but in the following passage from one of his letters, we have some indication of this process: The Self governs the diversity of its creation by its unity on all the planes from the Higher Mind upwards on which the realisation of the One is the natural basis of consciousness. But as one goes upward, the view changes, the power of consciousness changes, the Light becomes ever more intense ...
... intuitive mind or the higher mind be influenced by hostile forces? No — but the hostile forces can use the forces sent down from them if they get mixed with the mind or the vital. What is the distinction between the knowledge of the Higher Mind and that of the Illumined mind? The substance of knowledge is the same, but the higher mind gives only the substance... Through Ignorance, Division and separative Ego. Is every plane or everything below the Supermind influenced more or less by the Ignorance? I gather that the planes from the Higher Mind to the Over-mind are also of the spiritual consciousness. The planes below are of the spiritual consciousness, but when there is a dynamic action from them, it is always a mixed action ...
... of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother. The covers change after being removed successively into covers of different colours in the order: yellow (activity of the mind plane), pink (psychic love), blue (higher-mind at work, spiritual consciousness of Divine Truth), white (the force of purity and the power of Divine Truth), gold (knowledge). Here, this means that as the mental consciousness grows higher and... the golden light of the Divine Truth as “gold at its most intense indicates something from the supramental”. It gets modified according to the level it crosses, creates the ranges from overmind to higher mind. Then, there is the luminous golden lotus as a clear indication of how Champaklal's psychic being could come to be fully open and receive something from the Supramental. After this, with the ...
... Overmind touch. 5. "Illumined Mind. 6. "Difficult to say. More of Higher Mind perhaps than anything else—but something of illumination and intuition also. 7. "it is a mixture. Something of the Illumined Mind, something of the Poetic Intelligence diluting the full sovereignty of the higher expression. 8. "Higher Mind combined with Illumined. 9. "Illumined Mind with something from Intuition ...
... which, as he yet sees, is within the unreal or less real appearance. His denial of the Divine comes from the insistence of his mind and vital temperament on the friend as he is, even though his higher mind may try to escape from that by the idea of what his friend will be; otherwise it is difficult to understand the stupendous exaggeration of his thesis that the love for friends is the only real... it would be a Divine All or some kind of Cosmic Self or Spirit rather than the Absolute. For if there is an Absolute—which intellectually one is not bound to believe, except that something in the higher mind seems imperatively to ask for it or feel that it is there,—it must surely exist in its own absolute right, not constituted, not dependent for its being on a collectivity of distinct selves, but ...
... itself give the Yogic knowledge or know the Divine—it can only have ideas about the Divine, but having ideas is not knowledge. In the course of the sadhana intellect has to be transformed into the higher mind which is itself a passage towards the true knowledge. It is no use trying to decide the things of the Spirit by the power and in the light of the intellect. The intellect can only reason and... The intellect is made up of imaginations, perceptions, inferences. The pure reason is quite another thing, but only a few are able to use it. As for knowledge,—in Yoga it comes first from the higher mind, but even that does not see the whole Truth, only sides of it. Pure reason deals with things in themselves, ideas, concepts, the essential nature of things. It lives in the world of ideas ...
... always there in the inner Purusha. That means the light of the divine consciousness (the Mother's Consciousness, white light) in the vital. Blue is the higher mind, gold the divine Truth. So it is the vital with the light of the higher mind and the divine Truth in it emanating the Mother's light. ...
... yellowish white, cool and peaceful, coming down from above. Is this the light of the higher mind consciousness or of some spiritual consciousness? It depends on the shade of the yellow. If it is golden white it comes from above the mind and the combination suggests the Maheshwari-Mahakali power. Higher Mind colour is pale blue. 21 March 1938 ...
... to the intellect of others. The other source of my philosophy was the knowledge that flowed from above when I sat in meditation, especially from the plane of the Higher Mind when I reached that level; they [ the ideas from the Higher Mind ] came down in a mighty flood which swelled into a sea of direct Knowledge always translating itself into experience, or they were intuitions starting from experience ...
... ascent there is a conversion into a new consciousness and an infusion of this new consciousness into the whole of the nature. Page 300 Thus rising beyond intellect through illuminated higher mind to the intuitive consciousness, we begin to look at everything not from the intellect range or through intellect as an instrument, but from a greater intuitive height and through an intuitivised... mind. Is there no need of the higher spiritual planes for separating the mind, vital and physical from one another? Spiritual and supramental are not the same thing. The spiritual planes from higher mind to Overmind are accessible to the old sadhanas so there is no difficulty about that. If they were not accessible there would have been no Yoga at all and no Yogis in the past in India. 17 April ...
... 9 June 1929 What is exactly the nature of religion? Is it an obstacle in the way of the spiritual life? Religion belongs to the higher mind of humanity. It is the effort of man's higher mind to approach, as far as lies in its power, something beyond it, something to which humanity gives the name God or Spirit or Truth or Faith or Knowledge or the Infinite, some ...
... have in the Overmind itself on its native levels. Most of the movements come not from the Overmind, but down from higher mind ranges. The ideas with which these experiences are penetratedand on which they seem to rest their claim to truth are lot of the Overmind, but of the higher Mind or sometime of the illumined Mind; but they are mixed with suggestms from the lower mind and vital regions and badly ...
... thing does not change, for there is something missing, something not there, that is the consciousness. That's all. Source Religion Religion belongs to the higher mind of humanity. It is the effort of man's higher mind to approach, as far as lies in its power, something beyond it, something to which humanity gives the name God or Spirit or Truth or Faith or Knowledge or the Infinite, some ...
... instrument. Work of the enlightened mind: it is very powerful for leading the being to the Divine and can be very useful for progress. Higher mind: its superiority consists in its capacity to open to the divine light. Voice of the higher mind: in quest of Truth. The mind attains its full utility when it knows how to listen to the higher inspiration. Aspiration of the mind ...
... n: Higher Mind with some colour of Illumination and just touched by Overmind Intuition—a faultless movement of vision and colour, all welded together into a harmonious whole. The next two rise still more to an extraordinary lofty inspiration (Illumined Mind with the Overmind touch)—and present a most profoundly suggestive spiritual picture. The last two are very high up in the Higher Mind—just ...
... profound That never human grief can overthrow. Sri Aurobindo's Comment "It is quite up to the mark—very fine. Higher Mind, I think, with lines 6 and 7 raised up to what might be called (if we must find a name for these combinations) Higher Mind Intuition. There are various combinations possible, as in the process of sublimation each higher plane infuses itself into those below ...
... Comment "A very fine poem throughout. The 2nd and 3rd lines are from the Illumined Mind. The first from the Higher Mind—the fourth is in substance from the Illumined Mind but there is a mental rhythm— very good and expressive rhythm, no doubt. The rest is the Higher Mind with touch of Illumination and Intuition—the last three lines are the Illumined Mind with Overmind Intuition touch, ...
... trance. Sri Aurobindo's Comment "All the lines are very fine, especially those marked. The three first of each stanza have a great intensity of vision—Higher Mind plus Overmind Intuition touch. The last—Higher Mind plus Illumined Mind—is not equal in vision but still not too far below." (Is it a bad habit on my part or the natural movement of a certain type of inspiration ...
... him Supermind and considered the ultimate goal of the Yoga taught by him, still awaits its hour of manifestation. Immediately higher than the reflective intelligence is a plane of thought, termed Higher Mind, which is not conceptive from outside its object but is projected from a Spirit-stuff which secretly pervades everything. Rising from that pervasion it comes charged with a broad and strong clarity... speech not merely touched by the overhead, as happens at times in Sri Aurobindo's earlier philosophic or other verse, but unified with it and yet not so much assimilated into the specific tones of Higher Mind, Illumined Mind, Intuition or Overmind as itself assimilating them. Its own mode remains, but within the possibilities of that mode the overhead is fully exploited instead of new possibilities being ...
... Overmind touch. 5."Illumined Mind. 6."Difficult to say. More of Higher Mind perhaps than anything else—but something of illumination and intuition also. 7."It is a mixture. Something of the Illumined Mind, something of the Poetic Intelligence diluting the full sovereignty of the higher expression. 8."Higher Mind combined with Illumined. 9."Illumined Mind with something from ...
... from the Mandukya Upanishad but also from a brief correspondence between Sri Aurobindo and me in 1948. When I had asked him to help me draw inspiration from the 'overhead' planes which he had named Higher Mind, Illumined Mind, Intuitive Mind and Overmind, with the still unmanifested Supermind at the top, and whose distinguishing traits and powers he had explained, I was eager to get lines of English and... consciousness', the home of the Mantras. I was under the impression that, like that other line of his - O passi graviora! dabit deus his quoque finem - it was a perfect mixture of the Higher Mind with the Psychic; and the impression was based on something you had written to me in the past. Similarly I remember you definitely declaring Wordsworth's The Winds come to me from the fields ...
... "Creative Intelligence" in a couple of varying phases: quiet felicity in the one and vivida vis (lively force) in the other. Perhaps the second instance is half-way into the "Higher Mind". The next two seem to be the "Higher Mind" taken up into the "Illumined Mind" and verging on the "Intuition". The first of the pair of pen-ultimate instances looks like the direct penetrative simplicity of the "Intuition" ...
... certain definite lines. Its effectiveness as well as its action is determined first by its own height and intensity or that of the plane from which it conies (it may be from any plane ranging from the Higher Mind upward to the Overmind), partly by the condition of the objects or the field in which it acts, partly by the movement which it has to effect, general or particular. It is neither a magician's wand... overmind consciousness (direct) in anything he said or did, but what he did was done with the greatness of the Avatar. But there have since been men who did live in touch with the planes above mind—higher mind, illumined mind, Intuition. There is no question of asking whether they were "greater" than Rama ; they might have been less "great", but they were able to live from a new plane of consciousness ...
... knowledge I was receiving from the Mother, he found no need to comment on my letters at length. A little later he told me in connection with some other question that this knowledge was from the Higher Mind level. Just for the sake of interest I counted the number of mistakes I had made in transcribing this knowledge, that is, in giving it mental expression; there were very few in three or four years... of mind and lives above the head, the word "difficulty" exists no more for him. For the hostile or the lower forces cannot touch the higher planes which are the Mother's. From the higher mind upwards all is free from the action of the hostile forces. For they all belong to the spiritual consciousness though with varying degrees of light and power and completeness. I ...
... To separate mind, vital and physical from each other, is there no need of the higher spiritual planes? Spiritual and supramental are not the same thing. The spiritual planes from higher mind to overmind are accessible to the old sadhanas so there is no difficulty about that. If they were not accessible there would have been no Yoga at all and no Yogis in the past in India. ... spiritualisation and supramentalisation. Spiritualisation means the descent of the higher peace, force, light, knowledge, purity, Ananda etc. which belong to any of the higher planes from higher mind to Overmind, for in any of these the Self can be realised. It brings about a subjective transformation; the instrumental Nature is only so far transformed that it becomes an instrument for the Cosmic ...
... they come you take them for your own and they have much greater force. Is it true that no one has his own thoughts? Either they come from the lower nature — from people — or from the higher mind? All comes from Nature of which people are a part — but they are called ours because they receive a particular form, arrangement or combination in our own minds. All thoughts... itself give the Yogic knowledge or know the Divine — it can only have ideas about the Divine, but having ideas is not knowledge. In the course of the sadhana intellect has to be transformed into the higher mind which is itself a passage towards the true knowledge. How to distinguish the thoughts and actions of the mind, vital and physical? Are not the vital's thoughts and actions derived from ...
... (Letter 1936) II "The poem was originally written from a lower level, a mixture perhaps of the inner mind, psychic, poetic intelligence, sublimised vital, afterwards with the Higher Mind, often illumined and intuitivised, intervening.... Moreover there have been several successive revisions each trying to lift the general level higher and higher towards a possible Overmind poetry... higher planes fused together, sometimes lifting any one of these higher planes to its highest or the psychic, poetic intelligence, or vital towards them.... It is only occasionally that it is pure Higher Mind—a mixture of the Intuitive or Illumined is usually there......" - Letters on "Savitri" — 1936 III "...I do not work at the poem once a week, I have other things to do. Once ...
... parts of human nature. It is as old as man himself, and has been passing through various stages to help him on his way to the Spirit. In its evolved form "it belongs to the higher mind of humanity. It is the effort of man’s higher mind to approach, as far as lies in its power, something beyond it, something to which humanity gives the name of God or Spirit or Truth or Faith or Knowledge or the Infinite ...
... evolution. Once spiritually awakened, mental man strives to exceed himself, and as he explores the ascending possibilities, he reaches stage after stage of the overhead—or above mind—consciousness: Higher Mind, Illumined Mind, Intuition, Overmind, and beyond it—"at the end of a far-off vista"—Supermind. Sri Aurobindo devotes several pages in The Life Divine 11 and the whole canto in Savitri entitled... progress, really implies an increasing capacity for comprehension, the emergence of a new power of direct vision, the play of puissant truth-consciousness and truth-effectuation: As the Higher Mind brings a greater consciousness into the being through the spiritual idea and its power of truth, so the Illumined Mind brings in a still greater consciousness through a Truth sight ...
... the higher nature. The object of the Yoga is the transformation of terrestrial beings, not of the Asuras. Page 648 Is it not possible again to begin the sadhana of ascension to the higher mind and supermind and work out the transformation below just as you did for yourself, keeping this outward and inward Sangha formation, if possible, though curtailing the outward work to a minimum or... an incorrect statement of my sadhana. I did not start by ascension to the supermind—I fought out the difficulties of the mind and vital first in such a way as to make it possible for not only the higher mind but the intuition and overmind to descend. The supermind comes last of all. 16 January 1934 Inconscience is the involved state of the Sachchidananda. It is all-knowing, only the knowledge... achieved here so far among sadhaks? What is the next step? The next step is to get into contact with the higher planes above spiritual mind—for as soon as one gets into the spiritual Mind or Higher Mind, this realisation is possible. Now the big question is: Is the realisation of the Self a state of perpetual peace, joy and bliss? If it is thoroughly established, it is one of internal ...
... 1955 This talk is based upon Bases of Yoga , Chapter 3, "In Difficulty". Sweet Mother, what is the work of the higher mind? Work? What exactly do you want to know? What it ought to do? Or what should one...? Its role. The role of the higher mind? It ought to receive inspirations from above, ought to transmit them in the form of ideas to the most material mind, so that the... the latter may execute things, make formations. It serves as an intermediary between the higher power and the active mind. The higher mind is a mind of idea-formation and at the same time... ( The noise of the wind drowns Mother's voice for a moment. ) That's its purpose. It can also try to give some understanding of things which are above the more ordinary mentality, to explain, to clarify general ...
... 4)The Inner Mind, with its four domains: a)The inner Mind Intelligence. b)The Intuitive Intelligence. c)The Mystic Mind. d)The Mind of Dynamic Vision. 5)The Psychic. 6)The Higher Mind. 7)The Illumined Mind. 8)The Intuition or the Intuitive Mind. 9)The Overmind, with its four domains: a)The Mental Overmind. b)The Intuitive Overmind or the Overmind Intuition... usually of a packed kind in which occult symbols and visions weave a pattern baffling to the reason and the logical faculty yet impressively ordered in its own way. The planes starting with the Higher Mind are all "overhead": they have no organised centre in the human system. The Psychic is also not exactly a part of the gradation below the head: it is our inmost, our deepmost being and stands behind... without the powerful amplitude that belongs to the overhead levels. The Overmind's four domains are the highest levels of poetry. When the Overmind lifts into itself the Creative Intelligence, the Higher Mind and the Illumined Mind and in the process modifies itself to suit the new working it forms the Mental Overmind. When it takes up the Intuition together with these powers into itself and again gets ...
... of "planes", Higher Mind, but the sense of space on widening space, expanse on expanse of mystery, continuity on endless continuity of conceptual explora-tion, is lost. "Wander" has a plunging rhythmic effect which in collocation with "thoughts" and "eternity" carries the language to the intense and the immense that are characteristic of what Sri Aurobindo, taking us past Higher Mind through Illumined... blows can give Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears. The idea here is very great, the expression is perfect, though the plane may be not quite Overmind so much as a mixture of Higher Mind and Intuition. These planes are not easy to distinguish: we shall one day talk about them and their typical utterances. At the moment we are concerned with drawing a line between Phanopoeia and Logopoeia ...
... a self-chosen process of Light. 2)Ignorance of the human physical-mertal cannot essentially cease by the descent of the "overhead" grades of Spiritual Mind, which are — from below upwards — Higher Mind, Illumined Mind, Intuition, Overmind. For, the descent of these grades, even of Overmind, can never be complete when made under their own power. The physical-mental always dilutes their Light. It... Light is Supermind openly itself in human Mind-terms. 4) The first form the Mind of Light takes seems an added last rung of the luminous ladder of Spiritual Mind. It appears to stand below Higher Mind in quality of Light. But it is superior to all degrees of Spiritual Mind, even Overmind, if its quality of Light is compared to the quality the grades of Spiritual Mind have achieved in the phys... completely descended Spiritual Mind — an entire embodiment by Spiritual Mind of itself, which under its own power it could not achieve. The full conversion of the physical-mental into the Light of Higher Mind, Illumined Mind, Intuition, Overmind, which these grades could not formerly bring about, is done now by them on the basis of Supermind's establishment in the physical-mental. This conversion constitutes ...
... লক্ষণ ৷ গাভী সত্যের আলাের প্রতীক ৷ 28.3.34 সাধারণ মনের তিনটী স্তর আছে ৷ চিন্তার স্তর বা বুদ্ধি, ইচ্ছাশক্তির স্তর (বুদ্ধিপ্রেরিত Wil) আর বহির্গামী বুদ্ধি ৷ উপরের মনেরও তিনটী স্তর আছে ৷ — Higher Mind, Illumined mind, Intuition ৷মাথার মধ্যে যখন দেখেছ, ওই সাধারণ মনের তিনটী স্তর হবে – উপরের দিকে খােলা, প্রত্যেকের মধ্যে একটী বিশেষ ভাগবতী শক্তি কাজ করতে নামছে ৷ 30.3.34 প্রাণের উদ্ধৃগামী... দুইটীরই শক্তি ৷ 9.4.34 বেদযজ্ঞে পাঁচটী অগ্নি থাকে, পাঁচটী না থাকলে যজ্ঞ পূর্ণ হয় না ৷ আমরা বলতে পারি psychicএ, মনে, প্রাণে, দেহে ও অবচেতনায়, এই পাঁচটী অগ্নির দরকার ৷ 9.4.34 নীল — Higher Mind, ACÚST QUICOT – Light of divine Truth, উজ্জ্বল লাল – হয় Divine Love নয় ঊর্ধচেতনার Force. 11.4.34 ন: আমার সব সময় নীরব গম্ভীর এবং নির্জনতায় থাকতে ইচ্ছা হচ্ছে ৷ বাইরের দিকে গেলে এবং একটু... আলাে” এবং “aspiration ও তপস্যার আলাে” লেখেন ৷] সােনার দড়ি – সত্য চেতনার সম্বন্ধ মায়ের সঙ্গে; সােনার গােলাপ – সত্য চেতনাময় প্রেম ও সমর্পণ; সাদা পদ্ম – মায়ের চেতনা (divine conscious-ness) higher mind ও psychicএ খুলছে ৷ চক্রটির অর্থ = মায়ের শক্তির কাজ চলছে নিম্নের স্তরে ৷ 28.6.34 হীরার আলাে ত মায়েরই আলাে at its strongest – এইরূপ মায়ের শরীর হতে বেরিয়ে সাধকের উপরে পড়া খুব স্বাভাবিক ...
... vast moon upon the deep. Sri Aurobindo's Comment "A very fine poem, lines I, 4 are from the Illumined Higher Mind. The second comes very splendidly from the Illumined Mind, the third is Higher Mind at a high level. The fifth comes from the Higher Mind—the sixth, seventh and eighth from the Illumined Mind touched with something from the Overmind Intuition, though the touch is ...
... inner mind is not the higher mind; it is more in touch with the universal forces and more open to the higher consciousness and capable of an immensely deeper and larger range of action than the outer or surface mind - but it is of the same essential nature. The higher consciousness is that above the ordinary mind and different from it in its workings; it ranges from higher mind through illumined mind... a confused condition or passage in which one is getting out of the personal consciousness and opening into the cosmic (cosmic Mind, cosmic vital, cosmic physical, something perhaps of the cosmic higher Mind) without having yet 16. Sri Aurobindo , Letters on Yoga - Part Four , SABCL, Vol. 24, pp. 1608-09. 17 . Ibid., Parts Two and Three, Vol. 23, p. 1053. Page 312 ...
... infinite trance. SRI AUROBINDO COMMENT "All the lines are very fine, especially those marked. The three first of each stanza have a great intensity of vision -Higher Mind plus Overmind Intuition touch. The last -Higher Mind plus Illumined Mind - is not equal in vision but still not too far below." (Is it a bad habit on my part or the natural movement of a certain type of inspiration... all the planes, briefly characterising them. It starts with the "inconscient" physical, then proceeds to the vital and the mental, with the psychic innermost recess between them - then sums up the Higher Mind, the Illumined Mind and the Intuition and finally goes to the Overmind, the Supermind and the unmanifest Absolute. Do you think a special key is necessary to explain the Page 423 ...
... fourth stanza is from the Intuitive, the rest from the Higher Mind - for there a high uplifted thought is the characteristic but more probably from some realm of the inner Mind where thought and vision are involved in each other — that kind of fusion gives the easy felicity that is found here. All the same there is a touch of the Higher Mind perhaps in the second line of the second and the last... fused into a fine intuitive authenticity and beauty, there is seldom anything to change; (3) a higher level of grander movement and language in which you pull down or reach the influences of the Higher Mind, Illumined Mind, Overmind Intuition. The last you have not yet fully mastered so as to write with an absolute certainty and faultlessness except by lines and stanzas or else as a whole in rare ...
... Presence or an Infinite Existence, an infinity of consciousness, an infinity of bliss,—a boundless Self, a boundless Light, a boundless Power, a boundless Ecstasy. The power of the spiritual Higher Mind and its idea-force, modified and diminished as it must be by its entrance into our mentality, is not sufficient to sweep out all these obstacles and create the gnostic being, but it can make a first... mind, which relies mainly on thought, conceives that to be the highest or the main process of knowledge, but in the spiritual order thought is a secondary and a not indispensable process. As the Higher Mind brings a greater consciousness into the being through the spiritual idea and its power of truth, so the Illumined Mind brings in a greater consciousness through a Truth-sight and Truth-light and... limitations, its conservative inertia, replaces its narrow thought-power and its doubts by sight and pours luminosity and consciousness into the very cells of the body. In the transformation by the Higher Mind the spiritual sage and thinker would find his total and dynamic fulfilment; in the transformation by the Illumined Mind there would be a similar fulfilment for the seer, the illumined mystic, those ...
... thinking mind and higher intelligence communicating with the greater mind planes (illumined mind, intuition, overmind) above." 4 (4) "...the sahasradala which centralises spiritual mind, higher mind, intuitive mind and acts as a receiving station fort he intuition proper and overmind..." 5 (5) "...the sahasradala padma through which the higher intuition, illumined mind and overmind... namely, that the Sahasradala 'at the highest opens to the intuition'. In other words, the 'mind' of the Arya-days can be taken to have included from among the later-demarcated planes not only the Higher Mind but also the Illumined Mind. The Super-mind started beyond them - at the plane of the intuition." This argument is rather insecure. The remaining new definitions do not appear to bear out... range² and in the years anterior to 1950 a particular division of the developing Yogic experience of the Overmind into three possible strata - first, that which takes up the Illumine Mind and Higher Mind and even the intellect to form a rental Overmind, next an uplifting of these lower movements and the Intuitive Mind together to constitute the Overmind Intuition, which is like the Intuitive ...
... character. He must understand the character of his higher psychic experiences. These including the voice are not direct from the Supramental but psychic and intuitive on the whole mental plane from the higher mind downwards. There is no reason to belittle them. Only in the transcription in his mind there is a mixture of his own mental and other suggestions which is almost inevitable at the beginning. We should... higher Yoga. If he wishes to do that he must replace his mental control by a belief in and a surrender to the Supreme Presence and force above the mind, an aspiration in the heart and a will in the higher mind to the Supreme. Truth and the transformation of the whole conscious being by its descent and power. He must, in his meditation open himself silently to it and call down first a deeper calm and silence... ideal and demand of the reason and the will. The cause is almost always a weakness of the vital being itself, for, when there is this weakness it finds itself unable to obey the dictates of the higher mind and obliged to act instead under the waves of impulsion that comes from certain forces in nature. These forces are really external to the person but find in this part of him a sort of mechanical ...
... double aspect—of the sound of supernatural experience as well as the experience of the original sound. While explaining the features of Overhead Poetry, poetry coming from the spiritual planes,—the Higher Mind, Illumined Mind, Intuition, and Overmind,—Sri Aurobindo draws our attention towards the fact that its essential character is in the rhythm and the language that come from some cosmic self rather... perfectly iambic lines, all light-heavy five times. It should also be noted that this line is essentially a narrative-descriptive line but of course belonging to a spiritual plane, here just the Higher Mind. The real Mantra with its compelling inspiration and the power of revelatory inevitability comes from the Overmind, the highest of the spiritual planes presently accessible to our speech. This line... That should at once clinch the issue. We may mention en passant that poetically the line with either has the same scansion: He car|ried a mor|tal lus|tre as| his robe|, the line belonging to the Higher Mind. What I am driving at is in the context of the “mistakes” dulling the mantric power of Savitri . The examples I have given are of lines belonging to the various grades of spiritual inspiration, ...
... Consciousness God, 138, 140 See also Divine, the; Ishwara Grof, Stanislav, 322, 391 Gunas, 108-18 transcendence of, 115-16 transformation of, 117-18 Higher Mind, see under Mind Horace, 39 Human development, 390-401 Human evolution cycles of, 250, 255 three successive elements, 255-61 Hypnosis (hypnotism), 53, 82, ... William, 361, 370 Jivatma(n), 84, 85, 86, 135, 379, 380, 386 in Monism, 374 cf. Central being Jung, C. G., 304 Knowledge (Vidya), 61, 143, 159 of the Higher Mind, 143-46 integral, 2, 197 and thought, 147 Kuhn, Thomas S., 316 Lajoie, Denise H., 390 Page 422 Lama Govinda, 321 Lamprecht, Karl... , 373, 374, 375, 377 See also Shankara Mind, 61, 193, 337 cannot integrate the being, 19 and consciousness, 8-9, 41-43 evolution of mental life, 256-58 Higher Mind, 143-46, 352 an Ignorance consciousness, 54-61 Illumined Mind, 146-49, 353 inner, see Subconscious mind an instrument, 259 and Matter, 6 mechanical, 47 ...
... our normal mentality is into a Higher Mind of automatic and spontaneous Knowledge, where knowledge assumes the nature of Truth-Thought. Its most characteristic movement is "a mass ideation, a system or totality of truth-seeing at a single view;...this thought is a self-revelation of eternal Wisdom, not an acquired Knowledge." 2 Beyond the Higher Mind of Truth-Thought is the Illumined... Truth-Consciousness, four principal ascents may be distinguished. These gradations may be broadly described as 'a series of sublimations of the consciousness' through what Sri Aurobindo has termed Higher Mind, Illumined Mind, Intuition and Overmind; "there is a succession of self-transmutations at the summit of which lies the Supermind or Divine Gnosis.... All these degrees are gnostic in their principle ...
... present is from the Higher Mind or the Intuitive. I said to myself: "If it is the true knowledge that is descending it matters little for me if it is from the Higher Mind or the Intuitive Mind or any other plane. The important thing is that it should be a pure and unmixed knowledge, the transcription by the mind in no way distorting it." As for terms like Higher Mind, Intuitive Mind, Overmind ...
... described by Sri Aurobindo. The first one nearest to the Overmind and the least contaminated by the Mind is pure Intuition; next, the intermediary one is called the Illumined Mind, and last comes the Higher Mind. They are all powers of the Overmind functioning in the Mind. The higher ranges are always more direct, intense, synthetic, dynamic than the lower ones where consciousness is slower, duller, more... plant, Life is in its original pristine mode; in the animal, it has become sentient and centralised Page 40 round a rudimentary desire-soul; in man, life-force is taken up by the higher mind and intelligence giving birth to idealism .and ambition, dynamisms of a forward-looking purposive will. We have, till now, spoken of the evolution of consciousness as a movement of ascension,... in his normal mental consciousness. But there is the possibility of growth and evolution and transformation of personality in higher and a higher spiritual degree through the upper reaches of the higher Mind, the varying degrees of the Overmind and finally the Supermind. These are the spheres, the fields, even the continents of the personality, but the stuff, the substance of the personality, the inner ...
... by depression only when one keeps the consciousness in the vital, when one remains there. The only thing to do is to get out of the vital and enter a deeper consciousness. Even the higher mind, the luminous, higher mind, the most lofty thoughts have the power to drive away depression. Even when one reaches just the highest domain of thought, usually the depression disappears. But in any case, if one ...
... whole affair (unintelligible as in his case to anybody but myself) and am working it out figure by figure. As for people, no! they are not floating in the supramental—some are floating in the higher mind, others rushing up into it and flopping down into the subconscient alternately, some swinging from heaven into hell and back into heaven, again back into hell ad infinitum, some are sticking fast... therefore be no question of jugglery about it. What is not true is not supramental. As for calm and silence, there is no need of the supramental to get that. One can get it even on the level of Higher Mind which is the next above the human intelligence. I got these things in 1908, twenty-seven years ago and I can assure you they were solid enough and marvellous enough without any need of supramentality ...
... He must understand the character of his higher psychic experiences. These, including the voice, are not direct from the supra-mental but psychic and intuitive on the whole mental plane from the higher mind downwards. That is no reason to belittle them. Page 338 Only in the transcription in his mind there is a mixture of his own mental and other suggestions which is almost inevitable at... higher Yoga. If he wishes to do that he must replace his mental control by a belief in and a surrender to the Supreme Presence and Force above the mind, an aspiration in the heart and a will in the higher mind to the supreme truth and the transformation of the whole conscious being by its descent and power. He must, in his meditation, open himself silently to it and call down first a deeper calm and silence ...
... and mind-forces are interdependent; but yet there is a difference in the quality of their movements and for facility of expression we have to separate them from one another. Thus we can speak of a higher mind, an intermediary mind, a physical and even a quite material mind; and there are many other distinctions that can be made. Now, there are mental planes that stand high above the vital world and... them with specious explanations and reasonings and excuses. It is this layer of mind that is most open to suggestions from the vital world and most often invaded by its forces. But there is in us a higher mind which moves in the region of disinterested ideas and luminous speculations and is the originator of forms, and there is a mind of pure ideas that have not yet been put into form; these greater m ...
... upholds and allows existence. Then, if you enter a certain state of consciousness and find yourself, for instance, in the higher mind (for generally it is more easily there that this happens; you have started from the physical and climbed slowly, rung by rung, as far as the higher mind), but instead of continuing your ascent on the ladder you enter into a kind of interiorisation and try to go out of the ...
... the O.I. [ Overmind Intuition ] in order to avoid any risk of overstatement. In the process of overmental transformation what I have observed is that the Overmind first takes up the illumined and higher mind and intellect (thinking, perceiving and reasoning intelligence) into itself and modifies itself to suit the operation—the result is what may be called a mental Overmind—then it lifts these lower... mind together into a higher reach of itself, forming there the Overmind Intuition, and then all that into the Overmind Gnosis awaiting the supramental transformation. The overmind "touch" on the Higher Mind and Illumined Mind can thus raise towards the O.I. or to the O.G. or leave it in the M.O.; but, estimating at a glance as I have to do, it is not easy to be quite precise. I may have to revise my ...
... ignorant, selfish, egoistic, moved by desire in the nature and puts it right. It needs a quiet mind [ to know the Divine Will ]. In the quiet mind turned towards the Divine the intuition (higher mind) comes of the Divine's Will and the right way to do it. Once the mental silence is attained, then in that the mental thoughts can be replaced by some vision and intuition regarding the work... directly, it is necessary to grow upward into the consciousness above the ordinary mind and to bring down these higher ranges into the mind, life and body. Indirectly through Page 263 the higher Mind and intuition the supramental Will is already acting on you, but naturally this indirect action does not bring the full power. The true automatic action (full of consciousness and light) begins ...
... triple principle. The tree is life in a new creation. Green is the colour of the emotional vital, the moon governs a spiritualised emotional life; blue is the colour of the higher mind, the moon there governs a spiritualised higher mind life; the gold colour is that of the Divine Truth, whether intuitive or overmind—the moon here is the spiritualised Truth-life. As the star is sphaṭika -coloured, the triangle ...
... rarified immense Alone.... And slowly in myself I seem Infinitudes of worlds and men. Yes, it is the overmind view—but it can be felt in any of the higher planes (intuition, illumined or higher mind); something of it can be thrown by reflection even into the liberated mind and vital—I mean when there comes into them the sense of the cosmic Self, the cosmic Mind and vital etc. and they are no... fused into a fine intuitive authenticity and beauty, there is seldom anything to change; (3) a higher level of grander movement and language in which you pull down or reach the influences of the Higher Mind, Illumined Mind, Overmind Intuition. This last you have not yet fully mastered so as to write with an absolute certainty and faultlessness except by lines and stanzas or else as a whole in rare moments ...
... planes of the Overmind ] at present. Only those who have got fully into the cosmic consciousness can do it and even they cannot do it at first. One must first go fully through the experience of higher mind and illumined mind and intuition before it can be done. Planes of the Overmind There are different planes of the Overmind. One is mental, directly creative of all the formations that manifest... the Overmind that all these different arrangements of the creative Truth of things originate. Out of the Overmind they come down to the Intuition and are transmitted from it to the Illumined and higher Mind to be arranged there for our intelligence. But they lose more and more of their power and certitude in the transmission as they come down to the lower levels. What energy of directly perceived Truth ...
... Ignorance. The Self is met first on the level of the Higher Mind, but it is not limited to one station—it is usually felt as something outspread in wideness, but one may also feel a centralising consciousness in the Sahasrara or above it. A complete silence makes realisation of the Self more possible—but that can be had on the Higher Mind level far below Overmind. The Self and Time In ...
... Was there a chance of making an error? The experiences were all right—but they give only one side of the Divine Truth, that which one attains through the higher mind—the other side is what one attains through the heart. Above the higher mind these two truths become one. If one realises the silent Atman above, there is no danger, but there is also no transformation, only Moksha, Nirvana. If one realises ...
... in so far as there is a change necessitated by the change in the consciousness. Formerly you were writing from the higher mind mostly, but partly from the vital—the vital was often dissatisfied with my answers, so I ceased answering to it and wrote only what would help your higher mind and psychic. Now it is from the physical mind and vital that you often write and so my answers must be to them and ...
... for there is nothing here of seeking, no trace of mental construction, no labour of speculation or difficult Page 291 discovery; it is an automatic and spontaneous knowledge from a Higher Mind that seems to be in possession of Truth and not in search of hidden and withheld realities. One observes that this Thought is much more capable than the mind of including at once a mass of knowledge... with thought formulation as a minor and dependent activity. If we accept the Vedic image of the Sun of Truth,—an image which in this experience becomes a reality,—we may compare the action of the Higher Mind to a composed and steady sunshine, the energy of the Illumined Mind beyond it to an outpouring of massive lightnings of flaming sun-stuff. Still beyond can be met a yet greater power of the Truth-Force ...
... with its obscurity and ambiguity, its obstruction or tardy responses will have been transformed into a lower or supporting superconscience by the supramental emergence. Already even in the realised higher-mind being and in the intuitive and overmind being the body will have become sufficiently conscious to respond to the influence of the Idea and the Will-Force so that the action of mind on the physical... lesser instrumentation fragmented, diluted, diminished, obscured by the substance of the Nescience. All Ignorance rising or entering into the overmind, into the intuitive, into the illumined or higher-mind being would cease to be ignorance; it would enter into the light, realise in that light the truth which it had covered with its darkness and undergo a liberation, transmutation, new state of con ...
... "Second line Intuitive with Overmind touch. Third line imaginative Poetic Intelligence. 2."Imaginative Poetic Intelligence with something of the Higher Mind. 3."Intuitive with Overmind touch. 4."Intuitive. 5."Higher Mind with mental Overmind touch. 6."Mixture of Higher and Illumined Mind—in the last line the mental Overmind touch. 7."Illumined Mind with mental ...
... Haven't you suddenly felt...? I feel the Force. Yes, that's it. It's the only thing that has any reality. Yes. Because otherwise all the rest seems to me like a fabrication of the higher mind. Yes, that's right. Page 184 One can at will imagine or think one is immersed in some immense consciousness, but then there is nothing at all, nothing nothing at all. Yes, exactly... not go away; it knows it is incapable of feeling it, but it knows it doesn't go away. For me it's like the bankruptcy of the whole teaching. The whole teaching seems like a fabrication of the higher mind and nothing more—something that has no concrete reality. Mon petit.... I feel I don't want this anymore. It's as if the mind didn't want ANY of it anymore. It's the Mind we don't want ...
... destructive falsehood—a TOTAL contradiction, in fact, of this endlessly unfolding creative vibration. Some of the people concerned are here, others elsewhere—that is, it's the mental state (even the higher mind in some cases, not necessarily very down-to-earth) of this one or that one or.... It comes individually (and the person's name along with it). And a kind of uneasiness takes hold of my body, as if... Probably they were not immediately aware of it, but it's sure to have an effect. This has never happened before, it's brand-new. Before, there was always that Power transmitted through the higher mind (what Sri Aurobindo calls the Overmind); it was up there, dissolving, dispersing, changing, doing a whole lot of work, without any difficulty, effortlessly ( gesture above the head showing the tranquil ...
... the way to let me through—weeny little kids this high. Then I met a symbolic person (not a human person) whom I know very well, she was pale blue (that is to say, a being of the higher mind, a force of Nature in the higher mind), I know her very well, she is very often with me. She explained to me her difficulties and I explained to her what she should do; I told her, "I've already told you several times ...
... n to the Overmind Intuition in order to avoid any risk of overstatement. In the process of overmental transformation what I have observed is that the Overmind first takes up the illumined and higher mind and intellect (thinking, perceiving and reasoning intelligence) into itself and modifies itself to suit the operation—the result is what may be called a mental Overmind—then it lifts these lower... mind together into a higher reach of itself, forming there the Overmind Intuition, and then all that into the Overmind Gnosis awaiting the supramental transformation. The Overmind 'touch' on the Higher Mind and Illumined Mind can thus raise towards the O.I. or to the O.G. or leave in the M.O.; but estimating at a glance as I have to do, it is not easy to be quite precise. I may have to revise my ...
... "the poetic intelligence" and more generally "the creative intelligence"? Can it be part also of "the Higher Mind" or "the Higher Thought" which is an "overhead" plane ?) "It belongs to the poetic intelligence, but as in most of Milton it can be lifted up by the touch of the Higher Mind rhythm and language." "There are besides in mental poetry derivations or substitutes for all ...
... fourth stanza is from the Intuitive, the rest not from the Higher Mind—for there a high-uplifted thought is the characteristic—but more probably from some realm of the inner Mind where thought and vision are involved in each other—that kind of fusion gives the easy felicity that is found here. All the same there is a touch of the Higher Mind perhaps in the 2nd lines of the second and the last stanza ...
... dream. I woke to feel A human face yearning out of the vast. Sri Aurobindo's Comment "It is very fine. The first three lines are the Higher Mind rising into the Illumined and are very powerful. The rest is of the Higher Mind, except it may be the two before the last which are somewhat mixed with the poetic intelligence." Page 64 ...
... "That is extraordinarily fine throughout. But it is too fine for any need of remarks. Lines 3, 4, 5, also 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, Illumined Mind with Overmind Intuition touch - the rest Higher Mind suffused with Illumined Mind." MADONNA MIA I merge in her rhythm of haloed reverie By spacious vigil-lonelinesses drawn From star-birds winging through... SRI AUROBINDO'S COMMENT "I think it is one of your best. I could not very definitely say from where the inspiration comes. It seems to come from the Illumination through the Higher Mind - but there is an intuitive touch here and there, even some indirect touch of 'mental Overmind' vision hanging about the first stanza. "There are two ranges of Overmind which might ...
... inspiration which, according to him, can hail from one of the following planes: (1) The Subtle Physical, (2) The Vital, (3) The Creative Intelligence, (4) The Inner Mind, (5) The Psychic, (6) The Higher Mind, (7) The Illumined Mind, (8) The Intuitive Mind, (9) The Overmind. For example, quoting the lines Page 283 To me the meanest flower that blows can give Thoughts... Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears, he comments: "The idea here is very great, the expression is perfect, though the plane may be not quite Overmind so much as a mixture of Higher Mind and Intuition." (p. 275) Though he can exemplify the poetic creations of the hierarchy of planes and distinguish each plane's way of creating, he makes it clear that further research ...
... have in the Overmind itself on its native level. Most of the movements come not from the Overmind, but down from higher mind ranges. The ideas with which these experiences are penetrated and on which they seem to rest their claim to truth are not of the Overmind, but of the higher Mind or sometimes of the illumined Mind; but they are mixed with suggestions from the lower mind and vital regions and ...
... it to the intellect of others. The other source of my philosophy was the knowledge that flowed from above when I sat in meditation, especially from the plane of the Higher Mind when I reached that level. They [the ideas of the Higher Mind] came down in a mighty flood which swelled into a sea of direct Knowledge always translating itself into experience, or they were intuitions starting from an experience ...
... all arises from the condition of things spoken of there and depends upon it. Your own difficulties and those of the sadhaks whom you mention are due to the same cause, the pushing back of the higher mind and the higher vital and the psychic and what they have gained either into the background or behind a curtain and a domination by the difficulties of the ignorant and obstructing physical con... almost wholly to the physical mind and a little part of the lower vital ego. It is no doubt, helped by the inability to feel directly that the Force working on you or in you is mine although your higher mind and vital have more than once admitted it and felt that it could be nothing else. But the response has been there and the effects of the Force, though these are strongly interrupted and may seem ...
... the border has been crossed, there is no more 'ascent' and 'descent'; you have the feeling of rising up only at the very start, while leaving the terrestrial consciousness and emerging into the higher mind. But once you have gone beyond that, there's no notion of rising; there's a sense, instead, of a sort of inner transformation. And from there I would redescend, re-entering my bodies one after... and descent, but ( Mother turns her hand over ) something like inner reversals. I think the problem arises only when you try to see and understand with the mental consciousness, even with the higher mind. Page 381 I am telling you this because, as soon as I got your letter, I replied with what I'll read to you now; then I was immediately faced with something I couldn't formulate, the ...
... manifesting. As a comment on this note, Mother adds: ) I have experienced this hundreds and hundreds of times: one has a deep, true experience, but the mind, even the higher mind, immediately latches onto it (usually it's the higher mind) and very actively makes its OWN thing out of the experience, thus bringing in its own distortion. It comes merely as an addition, the distortion is not total, there's ...
... "Creative Intelligence" in a couple of varying phases: quiet felicity in the one and vivida vis (lively force) in the other. Perhaps the second instance is half-way into the "Higher Mind". The next two seem to be the "Higher Mind" taken up into the "Illumined Mind" and verging on the "Intuition". The first of the pair of penultimate instances looks like the direct penetrative simplicity of the "Intuition" ...
... or at least freedom to take my own way. During our time with Sri Aurobindo, we asked Him many questions. in an ascending order: Higher Mind, Illumined Mind, Intuitive Mind, Overmind, and the Supermind. Briefly, the Higher Mind is the plane where the mind has fallen silent or thoughts are seen to be occurring on the surface. In the Illumined Mind, thought is replaced by sight ...
... Savitri III Overhead Aesthesis Now all these overhead planes—Higher Mind, Illumined Mind, Intuition, Overmind—can influence, each to the measure of its distinctive or sovereign power, our various activities or preoccupations at the mental or the below-mental—the vital and the material planes. If the resistance from the lower powers—matter, life... most of all. Now 'overhead' poetry is simply poetry that has been thus influenced, whether to a greater or a lesser extent, by the spiritual power of the Overmind or by the other overhead powers, Higher Mind, Illumined Mind or Intuition. The influence may be the result of the higher power acting in one of two ways: ...in one it touches the ordinary modes of mind and deepens, heightens, ...
... thinks, the brain only reacts to it. There is a parallelism between the movements of the brain and those of the higher mind. But the brain is only a communicating channel; it is only a support for the higher activity. If the mind is passive it receives things from above – from the Higher Mind – and passes them on to the brain. Now, if the brain is dull, the mind cannot transmit Page 171 ...
... irresistibly to penetrate, much as X-rays do, the divers outer sheaths and reach vijñana and lose itself in Ananda. Between mind and supermind, Sri Aurobindo has located various "overhead" planes - Higher Mind, Illumined Mind, Intuition, Overmind - and a reaction of consciousness from any of these "overhead" levels that helps us to experience the rasa or essential taste of some fragment of experience... the third and fourth lines above; but Thought rises higher still, seeking other colours in the spectrum of its steep ascent. The next ten lines constitute the second great movement, from Mind to Higher Mind, then Illumined Mind, then Intuition, then Overmind - "glimmering wings" "gold-red seeking" "pale-blue-lined" "crimson-white" - beyond conceptual thought, beyond intermittent visions, beyond lightning ...
... the help of reasoning or the imperfect sense-data. With the light it carries the force of the Reality. 3. Third is Madhyam ā , the word that comes from the intermediate regions between the higher mind and the lower intelligence which deals mainly with life and matter. 4. The fourth is Vaikhari, the word or expression that comes from the throat, the sound expression, which generally deals... and this life connects itself with the kingdom of the lower and the higher vital worlds of the Spirit. Similarly the mental world when it manifests here on earth gets connected with the worlds of higher Mind and its powers and beings. The Master takes us from these mental realms to the centre of this creation and from there to the realms of the Eternal from where a Truth- world governs the whole movement ...
... is a birth into the Supernature, parā prakrti. The ascent has two stages, initial and final. At the initial stage, the most developed part of the consciousness of the Yogi rises to the Higher Mind, which is "a luminous thought-mind, a mind of Spirit-born conceptual know- ledge." "An all-awareness emerging from the original identity, carrying the truths the identity held in itself, conceiving... conceiving swiftly, victoriously, multitudinously, formulating and by self-power of the Idea effectually realising its conceptions, is the character of this greater mind of knowledge." 1 From the Higher Mind it rises to the Illumined Mind, which is a mind not of Truth-thought, but of Truth-vision. "Here the clarity of the spiritual intelligence, its tranquil daylight gives place or subordinates itself ...
... fighting since 1958: ten years. Not that the Mind of the cells had not tried, many times, to supplant the physical Mind, but each time it was as if engulfed again or, at best, it passively obeyed the higher Mind and the spiritual Vision, like a baby somewhat crushed by its parents of Light. Even when released from the sordid physical Mind, it shyly turned to the “higher” Light so as to “do its best”⎯but... madly grinding out some higher humanity, sanctified and purified, the whole old improved evolutionary jumble. It took the radical cleanup of 1968 for those cells to be freed from the “good” of the higher Mind as well as the “evil” of the physical Mind⎯for them to be themselves, purely. And this was when the miracle truly started. It is the secret that every “man” of the next species will have to discover⎯and ...
... intense and ardent seed-time of the Page 203 Spirit. In the stress of that seeking the truths held by the initiates but kept back from ordinary men broke their barriers, swept through the higher mind of the nation and fertilised the soil of Indian culture for a constant and ever increasing growth of spiritual consciousness and spiritual experience. This turn was not as yet universal; it was chiefly ...
... conceit but where everything else is so successful this seems to justify itself also." (16.5.37) Giant Wheel "The lines marked [the second stanza ] are very fine and more of higher mind than the mental: the rest are fine-though more mental. But the poem finishes very abruptly." (26.5.1937) Bird-Keveries [In answer to the question whether the expression here ...
... mind-energy with its lucid or recondite sweep of thought and here and there an outbreak of occult sight, a piercing by the bright poignancies of the psychic, a lifting into the large ideation of the Higher Mind. In Savitri the last three elements were more active than before, since the poet was now deep in Yoga. More frequent too were sudden visitations by the rhythm which passes through lines like the ...
... the ideal and demand of the reason and the will-The cause is almost always a weakness of the vital being itself, for, when there is this weakness it finds itself unable to obey the dictates of the higher mind and obliged to act instead under the waves of impulsion that comes from certain forces in nature. These forces are really external to the person but find in this part of him a sort of mechanical ...
... higher Yoga. If he wishes to do that he must replace his mental control by a belief in and a surrender to the Supreme Presence and force above the mind, an aspiration in the heart and a will in the higher mind to the Supreme Truth and the transformation of the whole conscious being by its descent and power. He must, in his meditation open himself silently to it and call down first a deeper calm and silence ...
... the humanistic, the ineffable; but it is there only as implied; only as reference, or as background, nonetheless very solid and real for that. Centrally and essentially it is the world of the higher mind, of a consciousness that penetrates deep into the heart of Matter and of what may be beyond: a world in which Eternity and Infinity are playthings and you watch Nature involved in the destiny of ...
... an inherent light of knowledge and a natural experience of the infinite. He distinguished in general a progression of four levels as having found rare voice in the world's literature and art: Higher Mind, Illumined Mind, Intuition, Overmind. A fifth and highest plane, which he named Supermind and whose realisation above on its own peaks and ultimate descent below into the physical being are the ...
... another letter of the same year: "The poem was originally written from a lower level, a mixture perhaps of the inner mind, psychic, poetic intelligence, sublimised vital, afterwards with the Higher Mind, often illumined and intuitivised, intervening. Most of the stuff of the first Book is new, or else the old so altered as to be no more what it was; the best of the old has sometimes been kept ...
... gates. 4 Aswapati now passes into the higher luminous regions. He enters regions of larger breath and wider movement — the higher vital and then into the yet more luminous region of the higher mind. He reaches the heavens where immortal sages and the divinities and the gods themselves dwell. Even these Aswapati finds to be only partial truths, various aspects, true but limited, of the One ...
... frame of nature. But to begin by opening up the lower subconscious, risking to raise up all that is foul or obscure in it, is to go out of one's way to invite trouble. First, one should make the higher mind and vital strong and firm and full of light and peace from above; afterwards one can open up or even dive into the subconscious with more safety and some chance of a rapid and successful change ...
... Inconscience. Evolution has not come to an end with the appearance of mind; it awaits a release into higher, spiritual levels of consciousness of which there are many gradations, ranging from Higher Mind through Illumined Mind, Intuition and Overmind up to Supermind. The present-day trends towards spiritual growth are the sign that the human race is preparing for the next evolutionary leap — the ...
... character. He must understand the character of his higher psychic experiences. These including the voice are not direct from the Supramental but psychic and intuitive on the whole mental plane from the higher mind downwards. There is no reason to belittle them. Only in the transcription in his mind there is a mixture of his own mental and other suggestions which is almost inevitable at the beginning. We should ...
... decided: 'Come now, that's enough, isn't it? closed or not, I am not going back any more to see!' this could have gone on the whole day. It is made like that. It stops being like that only when a higher mind, the rational mind, tells it, 'Keep quiet!' Otherwise it goes on indefinitely.... So, if by ill-luck you are centred there, in this mind, even the things you know higher up as quite true, even things ...
... being as well as the native heights of supramental and pure spiritual being." 36 Among the higher planes of mental being, Sri Aurobindo distinguishes various distinct levels which he terms Higher Mind, Illumined Mind, Intuitive Mind and Overmind, culminating in what Sri Aurobindo calls Supermind or the Truth-Consciousness which secretly supports all the universe and leads all towards itself through ...
... outer, quite human, lower vital part and, in all but a few, it is the most clamourous and insistent part. But what was dissatisfied in you? It was the soul within, first of all, and through it the higher mind and the higher vital. Why then find fault with the Divine for misleading you when it turned you to the Yoga or Page 71 brought you here? It was simply answering to the demand of your ...
... eternity – the golden Light within, our glory and ecstasy of being. The second means of acquiring spiritual knowledge and experience is by gaining access to the spiritual levels above the mind: higher mind, illumined mind, intuition and overmind. 46 “In the East, especially in India, the metaphysical thinkers have tried, as in the West, to determine the nature of the highest Truth by the intellect ...
... outer, quite human lower vital part and, in all but a few, it is the most clamorous and insistent part. But what was dissatisfied in you? It was the soul within, first of all, and through it the higher mind and the higher vital. Why then find fault with the Divine for misleading you when it turned to the Yoga or brought you here? It was simply answering to the demand of your own inner being and the ...
... thinking but by illumination and intuition or at the least by a large spontaneous many-sided unifying play of ideas, the work of the overhead plane nearest to our intellect and named by Sri Aurobindo "Higher Mind". This knowledge percolates into our mind with a sudden sense of wideness and peace accompanying it. The soul's truth-feeling brings a sense of depth which at the same time holds delight and strength ...
... everything came to him from "overhead". But my practice, helped all the time by Sri Aurobindo, of receiving poetic inspiration again and again from the planes above that of the creative intelligence -Higher Mind, Illumined Mind, Intuition, Overmind - has trained the mental Me not exactly to escape ...from the confines of thought To where Mind motionless sleeps waiting Light's birth 1 but ...
... Overmind poetry." In the same letter we read: "The poem was originally written from a lower level, a mixture of the inner mind, psychic, poetic intelligence, sublimised vital, afterwards with the Higher Mind, often illumined and intuitivised, intervening." Since the time of Nirodbaran's discovery other drafts of the same version have surfaced. One of them mostly precedes the matter in the exe ...
... higher powers from beyond the mind coming down to act in the aspiring consciousness in the course of the Integral Yoga. Here the Supermind, no less than the Spiritual Mind with its four levels - Higher Mind, Illumined Mind, Intuition, Overmind - has been at play, but more indirectly than otherwise. The first direct action of the Supermind in the human constitution in a regular way took place on December ...
... - Eagles of rapture lifting flickerless A golden trance wide-winged on golden air. Page 224 SRI AUROBINDO'S COMMENT: It comes from the higher mind except for the third and seventh lines which have illumination and are very fine. Amal is a genius. His remarkable books are a great revelation to the whole of humanity. * ...
... miracle.” ‘And after having talked of the descent of the Supramental, he said that one had to prepare an intermediary between our present mental condition (even in the highest levels of the higher mind) and the supramental region. For he said that if one entered directly into the Gnosis, it would be such an abrupt change that the constitution of our physical state would not be able to stand it ...
... d, harmonised mental being, she has tried to go higher and deeper within and call out into the front the soul and inner mind and heart, call down from above the forces of the spiritual mind and higher mind and overmind and create under their light and by their influence the spiritual sage, seer, prophet, God-lover, Yogin, gnostic, Sufi, mystic. This is man's only way of true self-exceeding: for ...
... overmind consciousness (direct) in anything he said or did, but what he did was done with the greatness of the Avatar. But there have since been men who did live in touch with the planes above mind—higher mind, illumined mind, Intuition. There is no question of asking whether they were "greater" than Rama; they might have been less "great", but they were able to live from a new plane of consciousness. ...
... evolution. The evolution I speak of is not the evolution of the Darwinian theory. Spiritual and Supramental Spiritual and supramental are not the same thing. The spiritual planes from higher mind to Overmind are accessible to the old sadhanas so there is no difficulty about that. If they were not accessible there would have been no Yoga at all and no Yogis in the past in India. If ...
... these are to remain the descent of the supramental is hardly necessary—for a change of consciousness which would bring mental-spiritual union with the Divine, the Overmind is sufficient, even the Higher Mind is sufficient. The supramental descent is necessary for a dynamic action of the Truth in mind, vital and body. This would imply as a final result the disappearance of the unconsciousness of the body; ...
... being so; so much of the poetry of Rupert Brooke as I have seen, for instance, always gives me that impression. In our own language I might say that it is an inspiration which tries to come from the higher mind but only succeeds in inflating the voice of the poetic intelligence. 1 November 1936 Early Twentieth-Century English Poetry About modern English poetry of the early part of this century ...
... country—he is not in the least a mystic poet, he was too Latin and Roman for that. Majestic sadness, word-magic and vision need not have anything to do with the psychic; the first can come from the higher mind and the noble parts of the vital, the others from almost anywhere. I do not mean to say there was no psychic touch at all anywhere in Virgil. And what is this unknown country? There are plenty of ...
... Inspiration Is there any coordination between the differences of style and the different planes of inspiration? I don't think so—unless one can say that the effective style comes from the higher mind, the illumined from the illumined mind, the inspired from the plane of intuition. But I don't know whether that would stand at all times—especially when each style reaches its inevitable power. ...
... for the literary man, but even for him they are not the cause of his good writing, only an aid to it. The cause is within himself. If one lives in the inner consciousness, if the inner mind or higher mind become dynamic, all the ideas in the world and all sorts of knowledge come crowding in from within or from above; there is little or no need of outside food any longer. At most reading can be then ...
... therefore be no question of jugglery about it. What is not true is not supramental. As for calm and silence, there is no need of the supramental to get that. One can get it even on the level of Higher Mind which is the next above the human intelligence. I got these things in 1908, twenty-seven years ago and I can assure you they were solid enough and marvellous enough without any need of supramentality ...
... ly chaste and strong to convey an effect of restrained power and give a poetic body to the thought—and the thought itself is on a high level and has the emotion and truth of what comes from the higher mind. Judged independently, the one defect is that the style has not the note of perfect originality, the intensity of discovery in it; I find too much echo of my own poetry in Ahana . But this deri ...
... surrender becomes more possible. Surrender and the Brahmic Condition There can be [ devotion and surrender on the higher spiritual planes ], but it is not inevitable as in the psychic. In the higher mind one may be too conscious of identity with the "Brahman" to have devotion or surrender. The Brahmic condition brings a negative peace of shanti and mukti in the soul. Self-giving brings a positive ...
... transformation to its divine Master. This higher mentality and this deeper soul, the psychic element in man, are the two grappling hooks by which the Divine can lay hold upon his nature. The higher mind in man is something other, loftier, purer, vaster, more powerful than the reason or logical intelligence. The animal is a vital and sensational being; man, it is said, is distinguished from the animal ...
... of the divine life in humanity; for by that rending, by the illumining descent of the higher into the nature of the lower being and the forceful ascent of the lower being into the nature of the higher, mind can recover its divine light in the all-comprehending supermind, the soul realise its divine self in the all-possessing all-blissful Ananda, life repossess its divine power in the play of omnipotent ...
... Many, if not all, of these conditions of the gnostic change can and indeed have to be attained long before we reach the gnosis,—but imperfectly at first as if by a reflection,—in higher mind itself, and more completely in what we may call an overmind consciousness between mentality and gnosis. × ...
... মাথার উপরে একটি পদ্ম দেখলাম – পদ্মটির উপরের side সূৰ্য্যরশ্মির ন্যায় আর নীচের side সাদাটে নীল ৷ উ: চক্রের উপরের side পায় Overmind ও Intuitionএর আলাে, সােনার আলাে বা সূৰ্য্যরশ্মি – নীচের side Higher Mind ও Spiritual Mindএর সঙ্গে সংশ্লিষ্ট যাদের আলাে নীল ও সাদা ৷ 7.4.34 Psychic being ভগবানের অংশ, সত্যের দিকে ভগবানের দিকে তার টান, আর সে টান বাসনা শুন্য, দাবী নাই, নীচ কামনা নাই ৷Psychic emotion ...
... something definite and rational, but a sheer force of obscurity and inertia which has somehow got itself concentrated in front for the time being. It is really a vital intuition enlightened by the higher mind which could find it out and that is a thing I necessarily lack in my present condition. Yes, it is true. These forces know nothing, but they are as it were attracted where there is something that ...
... spontaneous, for these are the two most powerfully impelling and compelling parts of the nature. When on the contrary the source of inspiration is in the creative poetic intelligence or even the higher mind or the illumined mind, the poetry which comes from this quarter is always apt to be arrested by the outer intellect, our habitual thought-production engine. This intellect is an absurdly overactive ...
... energy of the endeavour. 9 July 1931 Poetic Eloquence It [ poetic eloquence ] belongs usually to the poetic intelligence, but, as in much of Milton, it can be lifted up by the touch of the Higher Mind rhythm and largeness. 29 November 1936 Page 19 ...
... a worship in the thought and idea without love in the heart. It [ an inner state of dryness ] is because it is the analysing mind that is active—that always brings a certain dryness; the higher mind or the intuition bring a much more spontaneous and complete knowledge—the beginning of the real Jnana without this effect. The bhakti which you feel is psychic, but with a strong vital tinge; and ...
... cosmic consciousness. The concentration at the apex above the head is the station in the thousand-petalled lotus. There one becomes aware of states of mind above the ordinary human buddhi , the higher mind, the illumined mind, Page 270 the intuition, the overmind—finally when one has achieved the overmind one opens directly to the supramental consciousness. The cosmic consciousness ...
... y, demand or desire. For if these elements are there, then it is not the true thing. Most, even in doing Yoga, live in the mind, vital, physical, lit up occasionally or to some extent by the higher mind and by the illumined mind; but to prepare for the supramental change it is necessary (as soon as, personally, the time has come) to open up to the Intuition and the Overmind, so that these may make ...
... frame of nature. But to begin by opening up the lower subconscious, risking to raise up all that is foul or obscure in it, is to go out of one's way to invite trouble. First, one should make the higher mind and vital strong and firm and full of light and peace from above; afterwards one can open up or even dive into the subconscious with more safety and some chance of a rapid and successful change. ...
... receive suggestions from them through the brain, so it is quite possible that it may be felt as coming in through the head from above. That does not mean that it came from regions above the mind (higher Mind, intuition or Overmind). Correct reasoning means no more than coherent argument from a certain standpoint and does not validate a fit of anger or indicate for it a non-adverse source. It [ ...
... come back. It is natural for the lower vital to be made up of feelings, impulses and desires and to be attached to outer things—but that is only a part of you. There is also the psychic and the higher mind and higher vital which only need quietude and the help of the Force and Peace behind them to come forward more strongly and dominate over the lower vital and help to change it. You are too ...
... which supports its surface thoughts and dominates its habitual ways of feeling, character and action. I am not concerned here with the other parts of the being and I do not speak of anything in the higher mind, the psychic self or the higher and larger vital nature; for when the lower vital rises, these are pushed into the background, if not covered over for the time, by this lower vital being and this ...
... the true significance of things which may express itself in thought and speech, but is independent of them in itself. Yes, it happens like that. A touch of realisation is enough to set the higher mind knowledge or the illumined mind knowledge flowing. Page 56 × The correspondent said that his mind found ...
... concentrated passivity to the descending Influence are the best conditions for the descent. Headaches Due to Resistance What you saw was indeed a sun,—the sun of blue light which is the light of a higher mind than the ordinary human mind. The sun is the symbol of Light and Truth. This higher spiritual Mind is trying to wake in you, but at the beginning there is always a difficulty because the consciousness ...
... my Page 515 light—but it does not mean that that alone can come from me. 22 November 1933 There are many blues and it is difficult to say which these are. Usually deeper blue is higher Mind, a paler blue Illumined Mind—whitish blue Sri Krishna's light (also called Sri Aurobindo's light). March 1934 It depends on the shade of the blue. Ordinary pale blue is usually the light of ...
... ideal and demand of the reason and the will. The cause is almost always a weakness of the vital being itself, for, when there is this weakness it finds itself unable to obey the dictates of the higher mind and obliged to act instead under the waves of impulsion that come from certain forces in nature. These forces are really external to the person but find in this part of him a sort of mechanical readiness ...
... Other Publications Autobiographical Notes Some Philosophical Topics These discernable slow gradations—steps in the spiral of ascent—are, respectively, Higher Mind, Intuition (or Intuitive Mind) and Overmind. No, what is called intuitive Mind is usually a mixture of true Intuition with ordinary mentality—it can always admit a mingling of truth and error ...
... place. Spiritualisation and Transformation Spiritualisation means the descent of the higher peace, force, light, knowledge, purity, Ananda etc. which belong to any of the higher planes from Higher Mind to Overmind, for in any of these the Self can be realised. It brings about a subjective transformation; the instrumental Nature is only so far transformed that it becomes an instrument for the Cosmic ...
... mind; it is lacking in a spiritual philosophy and never really went beyond theology—in spite of one or two large thinkers who were the exception rather than the rule. One has to pass beyond even the higher mind, but not to have developed the spiritual light in it leaves the instrument defective and, instead of going above the mind, one is then apt to be content to remain below receiving whatever flashes ...
... certain definite lines. Its effectiveness as well as its action is determined first by its own height and intensity or that of the plane from which it comes (it may be from any plane ranging from the Higher Mind upward to the Overmind), partly by the condition of the objects or the field in which it acts, partly by the movement which it has to effect, general or particular. It is neither a magician's wand ...
... Catholics Page 17 say, the world of the Saints, though it is not quite the same). The beings she saw she called archangels. These beings belong to the intermediate world between the higher mind and the supramental, the world that Sri Aurobindo calls the Overmind. It is the world of the creators, the "Formateurs". The two beings who were always appearing and speaking to Jeanne d'Arc would ...
... the Overmind that all these different arrangements of the creative Truth of things originate. Out of the Overmind they come down to the Intuition and are transmitted from it to the Illumined and Higher Mind to be arranged there for our intelligence. But they lose more and more of their power and certitude in the transmission as they come down to the lower levels. What energy of directly perceived Truth ...
... have lost it in a state of unconsciousness. This happens very often, these are not exceptional cases, far from it. And this is what explains, you see, why some people—when they withdraw into their higher mind for instance—can enter into very deep meditation and be liberated from the things of this world, and then when they return to their ordinary physical consciousness, are absolutely ordinary if not ...
... others; this may happen in innumerable different ways. What I have described to you are the most frequent cases I have seen. So, the soul which wants to incarnate stays at times in a domain of the higher mind, quite close to the earth, having chosen its future home; or else it can descend further, into the vital, and from there have a more direct action; or again it can enter the subtle physical and very ...
... the process of spiritualisation it [the spiritualised mind] will have begun to pass out of the brilliant poverty of the human intellect; it will mount successively into the pure broad reaches of a higher mind and next into the gleaming belts of a still greater free intelligence illumined with a Light from above. At this point it will begin to feel more freely, admit with a less mixed response the radiant ...
... deals with ideas; is that what you mean? Not ideas, Mother. Not ideas? What else, then? Ideas, but... There is a part of the mind which receives ideas, ideas that are formed in a higher mind. Still, I don't know, it is a question of definition and one must know what exactly you mean to say. It is intellect that puts ideas in the form of thoughts, gathering and organising the thoughts ...
... (To a child) So? Sweet Mother, to what plane does intuition belong? It is one of those planes, one of those regions we were speaking about last time, which are intermediary between the higher mind and the Overmind. How does it manifest, Sweet Mother?—intuition. Um! How does it manifest? It is something, which takes place without any reasoning, any analysis, any deduction. Suddenly ...
... many qualities that men don't, but they lack this divine presence, which is altogether exceptional and exists only on the earth and nowhere else. All these inhabitants of the higher worlds, the Higher Mind, Overmind and other regions have no psychic being. Of course, the beings of the vital worlds don't have it either. But these latter don't regret it they don't want it. There are only those very rare ...
... have many qualities that men don't, but they lack this divine presence which is altogether exceptional and exists only on the earth and nowhere else. All these inhabitants of the higher worlds, the Higher Mind, Overmind and other regions have no psychic being. Of course, the beings of the vital worlds don't have it either. But these latter don't regret it, they don't want it. There are only those very ...
... many qualities that men don’t, but they lack this divine presence, which is altogether exceptional and exists only on the earth and nowhere else. All these inhabitants of the higher worlds, the Higher Mind, Overmind and other regions have no psychic being. Of course, the beings of the vital worlds don’t have it either. But these latter don’t regret it they don’t want it. There are only those very rare ...
... from this supreme Height, there is all the play of the various influences (gesture of mixture and conflict), that in itself is a sure sign: even a very slight descent, even into the domain of higher mind, higher intelligence, and the whole clash of influences starts. Only what is really at the top, with a perfect purity, has this power of spontaneous conviction. Consequently, whatever one tries ...
... "with the field, the combinations, the character and shades of the color, the play of forces": red = physical; orange = supramental in the physical; yellow = thinking mind; green = life; blue = higher mind; violet = divine compassion or grace; gold = divine Truth; white = the light of the Mother, or the Divine Consciousness. * About S 100, 000 Page 232 That's how it is, ...
... is certainly the medium with the greatest affinity with the divine Truth. Later, when one has emerged from the mental consciousness into a higher consciousness beyond the mind, beyond even the higher mind, and when one opens oneself to the Overmind regions, and through the Overmind to the Supermind, one can receive inspirations directly. And naturally at that point they become more frequent, richer ...
... head. That's something else. What is it? Sometimes I feel a pulling: something vibrating intensely that seems to be pulling me out through the top of the head. It's the opening to the higher mind. It's more like part of the kundalini method. It's not an exteriorization, but the mental opening to higher realms. Sometimes it happens just when I'm falling asleep. That's how you ...
... frame of nature. But to begin by opening up the lower subconscious, risking to raise up all that is foul or obscure in it, is to go out of one's way to invite trouble. First, one should make the higher mind and vital strong and firm Page 50 and full of light and peace from above; afterwards one can open up or even dive into the subconscious with more safety and some chance of a rapid and ...
... notion of space and time. It's something that can be very concretely sensed, if we stop seeing things the way we usually do. Many of these aphorisms were surely written at a time when the higher mind suddenly surged into the Supermind. It hasn't yet forgotten how things look in the ordinary way, but it now sees how they are in the supramental way. And as a result, there's this kind of thing, ...
... of man on the way to becoming superman, or those which the supramental being will possess when he appears on earth? In the first case, they are faculties that develop in man as he opens to the higher mind and overmind and through them receives the light of Truth. These faculties are not a direct expression of the supreme Truth but a transcription, an indirect reflection of it. They include intuition ...
... the overhead touch or might even reveal themselves as overhead if in proper immediate company—the last is the case with line 2. The overhead lines belong to the type that is now usual with you, Higher Mind lifted by Illumination to reach the Intuition level or else Illumined Mind rising to Intuition level; the latter in 9-11, 13-14, 17-18, 22-23. Both are very fine combinations." * ...
... perfect moon— They guard with silences the unbreathable Name. Sri Aurobindo's Comment "Very fine throughout. It is a combined inspiration, Illumined Mind with an element of Higher Mind coming in to modify it and sometimes rising to touch Intuition—even what might be called Overmind Intuition. The last touch is strongest in lines 2, 3, there is something of it in lines 5,6, 7 ...
... line Where passion's mortal music grows divine— For, in that spacious revel glimmers through Each form one single trance of breakless blue. Sri Aurobindo's Comment "Higher Mind throughout, illumined. The first and third couplets exceedingly fine, perfect poetic expressions of what they want to say. —the other two are less inevitable, although the second lines in both ...
... but all the same it is very fine and powerful. The blank verse is very good, each line has sufficient power to stand by itself, yet all combine together to make a linked whole. The basis is the Higher Mind: in the first half many of the lines (2-7) are illumined and there is even a strong influence of the Overmind Intuition. In the latter half, the same with a slighter illumination (9, 10), last ...
... Then every stroke of time shall carve to birth Immortal moods lit by your ecstasy. Sri Aurobindo's Comment "Very fine poetry. Blank verse rhythm very good. Illumined Higher Mind." * Page 87 ...
... lines rise out of the mental like islands out of the sea. Moreover, except in the lines marked with a cross where the illumined Mind gets strongly in, the 'note' is not quite pure,—there is the higher Mind tone, even a little of the illumined Mind, but not enough to make it absolutely that. It is a fine poem with very fine lines in it." Page 104 ...
... now a struggle against all that terrestrial formation... against, yes, the ignorance and unconsciousness of the earth's primal thought. It's still there; even in those who have developed their higher mind, who are able to emerge from that darkness and ignorance, it's still there—it's still there in a sort of mental or vital subconscient. And it's so dark! Thoroughly stupid, you know: it can be given ...
... . (because I've studied your problem a good deal—I seem as if I couldn't care less, but that's not true! I've studied Page 129 your problem a great deal), my feeling is that in your higher mind, the faculty of expression is developed—highly developed—so that as soon as the Light touches, it is transformed into ideas, words, concepts, like that. It DOESN'T HAVE THE TIME to be visualized ...
... possessing an inherent light of knowledge and a natural experience of the infinite. He distinguished in general a progression of four levels as having found rare voice in the world's literature and art: Higher Mind, Illumined Mind, Intuition, Overmind. A fifth and highest plane, which he named Supermind and whose realisation above on its own peaks and ultimate descent below into the physical being are the aim ...
... ess. And then, the vision of the whole, of things taking form and... ( wavy gesture of a Whole diversifying into innumerable forms ). In other words, that experience one generally has in the higher mind, in the psychic, is now the body's—it's the body in its cellular constitution that has it. It had that experience this morning: That alone was permanent, That which, through innumerable changes, ...
... completely forgotten. There are really quite interesting things .... Some of them give me the exact impression of a clothing (we might say an intellectual clothing, but it's not that, it's from a higher mind, but it's mentalized, that is to say, accessible to thought), a clothing of the experience I had of the supramental Consciousness, in which the difference between good and evil and all that looked ...
... nothing more than "above the mind". Sri Aurobindo focuses in it what he specifically calls "Supermind" or "Truth-Consciousness" and distinguishes it from the several other "overhead" levels such as Higher Mind, Illumined Mind, Intuition (or Intuitive Mind), Overmind. Sri Page 215 Aurobindo does not just posit these levels and beyond them the Supermind: having had direct experience of ...
... but to the heart and the mind and the super-mind He is manifest. Who know Him are the immortals. 10. "When the five senses cease and are at rest and the mind rests with them and the higher mind ceases from its workings, that is the highest state, say thinkers. 11. "The state unperturbed when the senses are imprisoned in the mind, of this they say 'It is Yoga.' Then man becomes ...
... "The Difficulties of the Mental Being", that there are divine planes in the mental being just as there are divine planes above into which one ordinarily enters in Samadhi. What are these planes? Higher Mind, etc.? SRI AUROBINDO: But there are divine planes everywhere. It depends on the context. NIRODBARAN: Here is the passage. SRI AUROBINDO (after reading it): I must have meant the reflections ...
... Supermind. SATYENDRA: Meher Baba declares that one has to go beyond the Karana Sharira and he identifies it with the mental plane. SRI AUROBINDO: What he and others mean is that it belongs to the Higher Mind or Higher Intelligence, not to the Manas or ordinary lower mental consciousness but to the Buddhi. SATYENDRA: Meher Baba says Karana Sharira is the root of Samskaras which are manifested on the ...
... matter. They touched *Another similar cycle can be traced farther back in the past. The classicism of Græco-Latin culture dominated by mind and reason – although it was a kind of higher mind and intuitive reason – was supplanted by the heart movement that Christ and the Christian cult initiated. Page 145 life, caressed its contour and periphery and larger lines ...
... die-hard views will always protest and cry that it is a m é salliance, a misjoinder to couple together Matter and Consciousness or even Life and Consciousness. But since the light has touched the higher mind even among Page 308 a few of the positivist type, the few may very well be the precursor of the order of the day. After all, only one bold step is needed: to affirm uneq ...
... the border has been crossed, there is no more 'ascent' and 'descent'; you have the feeling of rising up only at the very start, while leaving the terrestrial consciousness and emerging into the higher mind. But once you have gone beyond that, there's no notion of rising; there's a sense, instead, of a sort of inner transformation. And from there I would redescend, re-entering my bodies one after ...
... God's labour, 235 Cellular action, 173 Godhead, 5 Cellular consciousness, 180 Cellular experiences, 168-71 Hatha yoga, 70, 269 Central being, 262 Higher mind, 78-9, 244-5, 263-4 Chaitya purusha, 262 Chandernagore, 13-4 Illumined mind, 78-9, 244, 263-4 Change, real, 193 Image-worship, 6 Cherry trees, 61-2 ...
... seek leading to self-discovery. It is the constant urge of the hidden Spirit to emerge out of its involution that has created the successive steps in the ascension of consciousness into life, mind, higher mind, illumined mind, intuition, over mind—and supermind as the last term of its self-expression. In divine life, this supermind has to be reached through a complete annulment of the separative and limited ...
... whole affair (unintelligible as in his case to anybody but myself) and am working it out figure by figure. As for people, no! they are not floating in the supramental -some are floating in the higher mind, others rushing up into it and flopping down into the subconscient alternately, are swinging from heaven into hell and back into heaven, again back into hell ad infinitum, some are sticking fast ...
... a horizon of pale pink and pale blue. I doubt if it is the case. May 26, 1934 You didn't tell me the significance of the colours. Pink is the psychic colour—pale blue may be the higher mind—but blue has several significances, so it is not certain. I hear B left because he couldn't conquer sex-impulse within some specified period? B left out of ambition, not because of sex. ...
... as all is only the first step. What's the next step? The next step is to get into. contact with the higher planes above spiritual mind—for as soon as one gets into the spiritual Mind or Higher Mind, this realisation is possible. Now the big question is: Is the realisation of the Self a state of perpetual peace, joy and bliss? If it is thoroughly established, it is one of internal ...
... some people have surrendered." I asked, "All occult business, I suppose?" "Of course!" he answered. Good Lord, no! J's imaginations, that is all. Then he said that Mother reveals to his higher mind all her workings. Must be wonderful if it is a fact. The usual delusion! Voices, voices—the Mother in a confidential mood on the 7th storey! A very big "if". We have found that his knowledge ...
... permanent change in at least some part of the human nature, which we never noticed in him. He had genuine experiences received directly from the Mother; but they were always in the higher mind and affected his mind and vital mainly by influence and reflection. At one moment there was a chance of establishing them up to the heart level, but his insincerity (unwillingness to change) prevented ...
... People speak of the "spiritual ego". The question is: "Is there really an ego on the higher spiritual planes?" Certainly not. There is absolutely no element of ego there. For they are all (from the Higher mind to Overmind) divine planes of consciousness. On the higher spiritual planes there is no ego, because the oneness of the Divine is felt, but there may be the sense of one's true person ...
... religion have always worked together, in tandem as it were. Philosophy has been made dynamic by religion and religion has been enlightened by philosophy. What the intellect grasped through the higher mind was made living by religious and spiritual practice. Religion, which sometimes tends to become narrow and intolerant, has been widened and enlightened by the intellectual study of philosophy. ...
... I mean by the ordinary consciousness the human consciousness which has to be changed — it is into that consciousness that all these experiences from above come in order to change it first into higher mind and then into a still higher thing. Before divine Love and Ananda can be made to settle, there is much more that is to be done — first the psychic love must be there and other things besides. ...
... gates." 1 Ashwapati now passes into the higher luminous regions. He enters regions of larger breath and wider movement —the higher vital and then into the yet more luminous region of the higher mind. He reaches the heavens where immortal sages and the divinities and the gods themselves dwell. Even these Ashwapati finds to be only partial truths, various aspects, true but limited, of the One ...
... have very many qualities which men have not, but they lack this divine presence which is quite an exceptional thing belonging to the earth alone. All the inhabitants of the higher worlds—the Higher Mind, the Overmind and other domains—do not have the psychic being. Naturally, the beings of the vital worlds have not got it either. But these vital beings do not regret, for they do not want to have ...
... middle receives or is touched and influenced with great difficulty and after long travail, but the bottom portion is rarely connected or contacted, only nominally perhaps. In other words, if the higher mind, the intellect and intelligence is somewhat illumined with a new light from above and even if the higher vital comes under its influence in a general way, the lower Page 27 vital ...
... Ashwapati now passes into the higher luminous regions. He enters regions of larger breath and wider movement - the higher vital and then into the yet more luminous region of the higher mind. He reaches the heavens where immortal sages and the divinities and the gods themselves dwell. Even these Ashwapati finds to be only partial truths, various aspects, true but limited, of the One ...
... outward view of things, upon the mode and manner of his physical reactions to impacts of the gross outward world, the brute objects of physical life. The liberation of the mind, at least the higher mind, as an instrument of expression for the human consciousness was achieved to a remarkable degree in the Upanishads generally, particularly in some, although the beginnings of it might be traced even ...
... have very many qualities which men have not, but they lack this divine presence which is quite an exceptional thing belonging to the earth alone. All the inhabitants of the higher worlds – the Higher Mind, the Overmind and other domains – do not have the psychic being. Naturally, the beings of the vital worlds have not got it either. But these vital beings do not regret, for they do not want to have ...
... terms, the lower is the predominantly vital and physical ranges with a modicum of the mental shading into the higher mental. Up till here it is more or less the region of ignorance. Then comes the higher mind with its aspiring will: this is the purificatory agent – the purgatory – the crucible where forces are generated to stir and change and renovate the inferior sphere of our life. Indeed it is the ...
... when the faith is in darkness and ignorance, faith is open-eyed when the faith is in the light. To understand a little closely we have to distinguish things. The mind has a higher status: the higher mind is naturally receptive to the light and sufficiently aloof from a lower region of the mind itself which is not only limited but subject to up rushes from a still lower region, the vital, the source ...
... within. Their efforts indicate their call to the inner soul, inner mind and inner heart to come out into the front, and they also indicate their call to the higher forces of the spiritual mind and higher mind and overmind to come down; and we find among them the flowering, under the light and the influence that have come down from above, of the spiritual Sage, Seer, God-lover, Yogin, Gnostic, Sufi, Mystic ...
... consciousness and awareness. Sri Aurobindo has, in the course of his yogic research, discovered that there are several gradations of the rising layers of mental consciousness such as those of the Higher Mind, Illumined Mind, Intuitive Mind and Overmind; and Sri Aurobindo points out that even in the overmental plane of consciousness, the unity and integrality of the Object of realization is not effected ...
... entire being. And this immortal delight will lead the spiritual practicant to the Divine Mind, to the pure Intelligence, to the realm of Indra. An ordinary man is unable to have a glimpse of the higher mind, the pure Intelligence because he is confined to the narrow limits of the lower material world and his life abounds wit restless, impure and hurtful desires. It is not by a gross inert inspiration ...
... take a serious look at things. For them it is a sadhana, a true endeavour, a conscious preparation. For them it will be better to forget all the big words—the big words like Supermind, Overmind, Higher Mind, etc. We no longer have the right to discuss them, to chat over them. They are dreams, beautiful dreams, but out of our reach. They belong to Mother and Sri Aurobindo. Sri Aurobindo has himself said: ...
... godly, the other asuric. As the Divine he is Brahman, as the Asura, Aham. So man occupies a central place in the scheme of the universe. Above him are stationed the Gods in the region of the higher mind and the heart; below him upon the earth rule the Asuras, the powers of the lower mind and the vital. In between is man, the intermediary being. The Gods and the Asuras are in eternal struggle ...
... living. In all who aspired to it but could not yet take it up in its fullness sex will have to be refined, submit to the spiritual Page 153 or psychic impulse and a control by the higher mind .and the higher vital and shed all its lighter, frivolous or degraded forms and feel the touch of the purity of the ideal. Love would remain, all forms of the pure truth of love in higher and higher ...
... within and (4) vaikhar ī , the articulate word. In modem language we may say that the first one is the self-vibration of the Supreme Being or Consciousness; the second is the vibration of the higher-mind or the pure intelligence; the third is the vibration of the inner heart; and the fourth the vibration of physical sound, of voice. In philosophical terms of current English we may name these as ...
... and the world. The entire second Book is, in fact, Aswapathy' s travel over worlds heaped upon worlds in a complex cosmogony mounting from the plinth of the plane of Matter right up to levels of Higher Mind and the plane of the Cosmic Being leading to worlds of greater knowledge. Aswapathy represents the aspiring human soul down the millenniums of evolution in his search for the truth of himself, of ...
... of the divine life in humanity; for by that rending, by the illumining descent of the higher into the nature of the lower being and the forceful ascent of the lower being into the nature of the higher, mind can recover its divine light in the all-comprehending Supermind, the soul realise its divine self in the all-possessing all- blissful Ananda, life possess its divine power in the play of omnipotent ...
... one Reality was subjected by these forces of knowledge to the limitation of time, space and form and to all the exactness that is necessary for a material manifestation. Above this region of higher mind stood a race of beings in whose eyes "A light of liberating Knowledge shone, "They lived in the mind and knew truth from within". They could pierce behind outer appearances of ...
... of Purusha Silence Prakriti HEAVENS OF THE IDEAL (Canto XII) The Rose & the Flame GREATER MIND (Canto XI) Higher mind, Illumined Mind, Intuitive mind LITTLE MIND (Canto X) Pigmy Thought, Intelligence, Reason NIGHT (Cantos ...
... Aurobindo : Yes, but you can have the experience of the Cosmic Consciousness on any other level of consciousness Page 172 also. Generally, you have it on the level of the Higher Mind where you feel the two aspects static and dynamic as separate. But as you go above, you find the Overmind overreaches all the other levels and there the two aspects are gathered together and combined ...
... by Buddhi or understanding that you perceive these things, – it is by an inner perception or vision. It is not the intellect but something higher Page 45 that sees. It is the Higher Mind in which that inner perception, intuition etc. takes place. All true knowledge is by identity, not at all by the intellectual reason. You may put the knowledge into an intellectual form by the ...
... with greatness? Claudio's images are drawn from the vital and the physical, and yet they are passed through the fire and purified in the fountain and lifted up to a higher plane—say, that of the Higher Mind or the Illumined Mind—because, "there is something behind...which comes not primarily from the mind or the vital emotions or the physical seeing but from the cosmic self and its consciousness standing ...
... very little part – though it, too, has a part. The whole Page 263 process is very complicated. The first impulse is given by the vital and then there is communication with the higher mind – the intuitivefaculty.Then something from there comes down to the heart and the artist again takes it up into the mind, and gives expression to it. Disciple : That is to say, something ...
... little part – though it, too, has a part. The whole Page 256 process is very complicated. The first impulse is given by the vital and then there is communication with the higher mind – the intuitive faculty. Then something from there comes down to the heart and the artist again takes it up into the mind, and gives expression to it. Disciple : That is to say, something ...
... good and evil. Ordinary questions of morality don't arise in them. They look upon outer nature as a child behaving according to its wants. I think X's fall came in that way. He had gone into the higher mind, I do not know, if not even to the overmind state; he used to be guided by an inner voice which he accepted as the voice of the Divine and did everything in the light of that voice. When people were ...
... beauty, intermittent glimpses of the supreme beauty; he seems to have his permanent station on those heights. 233 If Milton in his 'mighty-mouthed' moments is inspired by the Higher Mind, if Shakespeare in his great dazzling moments of supreme utterance is the poet with the Illumined Mind, if Dante's poetry is charged again and again with the marvellous revelatory power of the ...
... going to happen. I simply was shown the thing that was to be done and did it. Disciple : How did you come to know that a certain thing is to be done? Sri Aurobindo : Through the Higher Mind. Disciple : Are there movements or persons, through whom you are working in Indian politics? Sri Aurobindo : Yes. At one time it was X; even I worked through Y for a short time ...
... consciousness, are what Sri Aurobindo saw in general, when he was an undertrial prisoner in the Alipur Jail in 1908 as the overhead or above-mind states or powers which he was later to name as Higher Mind, Illumined Mind, and Intuition, leading on to Overmind and Supermind. Making a reference to her 1912 statement in a conversation on 11 November 1953, the Mother said: There are superposed ...
... own case to anybody but myself) and am working it out figure by figure. 62 August 1935 As for people (the disciples), no! They are not floating in the supramental—some are floating in the higher mind, others, rushing up into it and flopping down into the subconscient alternatively, are swinging from heaven into hell and back into heaven, again back into hell ad infinitum, some are sticking ...
... be a reversion to the dead uniformity of a mechanised society, bound up with its material needs and their satisfaction, and harnessing the intellect to the service of Matter. But the soul and the higher mind of man will not consent to immolate themselves on the altar of the body, or barter away their boundless riches for a mess of pottage. Diversity in unity is the basic principle of creation—diversity ...
... man on the way to becoming superman, or those that the supramental being will possess when he appears on earth? In the first case, they are the faculties that develop in man as he opens to the higher mind and overmind, and through those regions he receives the light of the Truth. These faculties are not a direct expression of the supreme Truth, but a transcription, an indirect reflection of it. They ...
... but afterwards in Schopenhauer and Nietzsche as in Wagner it developed the intuitive vision and led to a deep change in European thinking. But the life of Germany remained still unaffected by her higher mind, well-organised, systematic but vitally and aesthetically crude, and she has failed to respond to the deepest forces of the future. The stream has turned aside to Russia, Russia deeply intuitive ...
... life; there is something behind and beyond the transience of the form, something that is lasting, satisfying, self-sufficient. What the sattwic nature seeks, therefore, is the satisfaction of the higher mind and the spirit and when it once gets this large object of its quest, there comes in a clear, pure happiness of the soul, a state of fullness, an abiding ease and peace. This happiness does not depend ...
... body will get mixed with the soil of the earth. Then I suddenly woke up from meditation. Was this a vision? What plane was it from? Yes, it is a vision from the plane of mind (not ordinary, but higher mind). It indicates the descent of the Mother with her light of purity and Truth (white and golden) into Matter. 5 August 1933 This afternoon in a dream I rose up very high and entered a beautiful ...
... that may be very material, there are inspirations that may be vital, there are inspirations that come from all kinds of mental planes, and there are very, very rare inspirations that come from the higher mind or from a still higher region. All inspirations do not come from the same place. Hence, to be inspired does not necessarily mean that one is a higher being.... One may be inspired also to do and ...
... experiences without forgetting anything, and even at will. But there are some rather uneducated people, for instance, who suddenly develop a faculty and have a direct experience somewhere in the higher mind or the psychic being or in some other part of the being. There are many reasons for this: it may be the result of former lives, it may be a phenomenon of consciousness of this life, it could be many ...
... decided: "Come now, that's enough, isn't it? Closed or not, I am not going back any more to see!" This could have gone on the whole day. It is made like that. It stops being like that only when a higher mind, the rational mind tells it, "Keep quiet!" Otherwise it goes Page 224 on indefinitely.... So, if by ill-luck you are centred there, in this mind, even the things you know higher up as ...
... have found something wanting of the Highest Truth. That is evidently what they meant. But they had no clear perception of these things because they lived at the highest in the spiritualised higher mind, and for the rest could only receive things from even the Overmind—they could not enter it except by deep samadhi (सुषुप्ति). Prajna and Ishwara were for them Lord of the suṣupti . 20 November ...
... vital, for he seems to have been engrossed in the Self in the waking life as well as in meditation. I think Ramatirtha's realisations were more mental than any thing else. He had opening of the higher mind and a realisation there of the cosmic Self, but I find no evidence of a transformed mind and vital; that transformation is not a result of or object of the Yoga of Knowledge. The realisation of the ...
... imply that the Jivatman status in which "it presides over the dynamics of manifestation" can be realised before the vital egoism is abolished? One can get the knowledge or perception in the higher mind "I am That" while the vital is still untransformed, -then the vital ego can take it up and give it a wrong application. * Even if the vital egoism can remain after realising the Jivatman ...
... collective organisation all the play of the various influences (gesture of mixture and conflict) Page 26 and that in itself is a sure sign: even a slight descent—even into the domain of higher mind, higher intelligence—and the whole conflict of influences begins. Only what is right at the very summit and is perfectly pure, has this power of spontaneous conviction. Therefore, whatever one may ...
... many—that can be touched or penetrated by the vital forces." Questions and Answers 1929 ( 26 May ) Which mental plane are you speaking of? Of the physical mind. Certainly not of the higher mind, for there are no adverse forces there. The reference is to the mind that deals with material things. Are there beings in the mental worlds? Yes, many. They are completely independent; they ...
... each stage of the ascent, there is a conversion into a new consciousness and an infusion of this new consciousness into the whole of the nature. Thus rising beyond intellect through illuminated higher mind to the intuitive consciousness, we begin to look at every thing not from the intellect range or through intellect as an instrument, but from a greater Page 5 ...
... the Truth? There are many planes or zones of the mind, from the plane of the physical mind, the lower zone of ordinary thoughts, full of error and ignorance and falsehood, to the plane of the higher mind which receives, in the form of intuitions, the rays of the supramental truth. Between these two extremes there is a gradation of countless intermediate planes that are superimposed one upon another ...
... time behind in order to understand. This is something that can be felt very concretely, but not with our way of seeing. Certainly, many of these Aphorisms were written at the point where the higher mind suddenly emerges into the Supermind. It has not yet forgotten how it is in the ordinary way, but it also sees how it is in the supramental way. And so the result is this kind of thing, this paradoxical ...
... unbalanced madmen. 6 April 1961 Mother, what are knowledge and intelligence? Have they important roles to play in our life? Knowledge and intelligence are precisely the qualities of the higher mind in man which differentiate him from the animal. Without knowledge and intelligence, one is not a man but an animal in human form. Blessings. 30 December 1969 In Your Conversations ...
... outer quite human lower vital part and, in all but a few, it is the most clamorous and insistent part. But what was dissatisfied in you? It was the soul within, first of all, and through it the higher mind and the higher vital. Why then find fault with the Divine for misleading you when it turned you to the Yoga or brought you here? It was simply answering to the demand of your own inner being and ...
... heartcentre and mind-centres and can descend from there if He wants to do so. Swami Ramatirtha I think Ramatirtha's realisations were more mental than anything else. He had opening of the higher mind and a realisation there of the cosmic Self, but I find no evidence of a transformed mind and vital; that transformation is not a result or object of the Yoga of Knowledge. The realisation of the ...
... supreme harmony of five eternal powers, Truth, Beauty, Delight, Life and the Spirit. These are indeed the five greater ideal lamps or rather the five suns of poetry. And towards three of them the higher mind of the race is in many directions turning its thought and desire with a new kind and force of insistence. The intellectual side of our recent progress has in fact been for a long time a constant ...
... in view the Dark Well poems when I wrote about Harin. I was thinking of his ordinary way of writing. If I re member right, the Dark Well poems came from the inner mind centre, some from the Higher Mind—other planes may have sent their message to his mind to put in poetic speech, but the main worker was the poetic intelligence which took what was given and turned it into something very vivid, coloured ...
... for a complete spiritual living. In all who aspired to it but could not yet take it up in its fullness sex will have to be refined, submit to the spiritual or psychic impulse and a control by the higher mind and the higher vital and shed all its lighter, frivolous or degraded forms and feel the touch of the purity of the ideal. Love would remain, all forms of the pure truth of love in higher and higher ...
... reach as that, even on the side of Knowledge or inner experience only. What you are experiencing belongs to the spiritualised and liberated mind. At this stage there may be intimations from the higher mind levels, but these intimations are merely isolated experiences, not a full change of consciousness. The supermind is not part of mind or a higher level of mind—it is something entirely different. ...
... of conscious ness or force which you may feel in that way one over the other. The planes are planes of consciousness and its powers—in the Page 166 mind there is a mind of Knowledge (higher mind), a mind of will (dynamic mind) and a mind of thought (intellect) which are one above the other and it is these you probably mean. They easily get covered when their forces come down into the ordinary ...
... meaning of Supramental Beauty? Is it the perception of the Divine as the All-Beautiful and All-Delight? No, that you can get on any plane, and it becomes easy as soon as one is in contact with the higher Mind. Beauty is the special divine Manifestation in the physical as Truth is in the mind, Love in the heart, Power in the vital. Supramental beauty is the highest divine beauty manifesting in Matter. ...
... many personalities in a man in his various ordinary planes of consciousness, so also several beings can associate themselves with his consciousness as it develops afterwards—descending into his higher mind or other higher planes of being and connecting themselves with his personality. That is for the principle. But as for the particular information [ about a certain person ], it is inaccurate. It has ...
... sources, the psychic behind the heart and the higher consciousness from above the head. Your nature has always been very self-centred and the mind active—in such a nature it is easier for the higher mind to act than for the psychic. The Mind and the Lower Nature It is necessary first to found the higher consciousness in the mind and heart. To deal with the lower nature before that means to ...
... bringing down is the method of Page 424 the Yoga; but it is not possible to do it with full effect until one has so prepared oneself that one can rise above the head to the Self in the higher mind. It was the point you had reached but could not confirm before the difficulties came in from the physical consciousness. Experiences of Ascent and Descent The ascent of the consciousness in ...
... inner mind, vision, will and the blue light you saw was that of a higher mental plane, a spiritual mind, one might say, which is above the ordinary human mental intelligence. An opening into this higher mind is usually accompanied by a silence of the ordinary mental thought. Our thoughts are not really created within ourselves independently in the small narrow thinking machine we call our mind; in fact ...
... part of the Truth. A sea in tumult usually indicates a vital upheaval or a period of strain and stress and struggle. The blue ocean is often a symbol of the spiritual consciousness in higher Mind one and indivisible. Normally, the ocean of higher consciousness is above the head (mind) and all below is that of the lower consciousness. Your seeing of the two oceans rather means that ...
... windows—created by the mind and the ordinary consciousness. This lid is changed to glass which means that between you and the higher consciousness there is left only a transparent lid (probably the higher mind which is the first stage of the higher consciousness) and through that the light can come to you in your own Adhar. It is a kind of promise or prospect held out to you in answer to your prayer. ...
... up from the subconscient. It does not abolish the higher consciousness in the physical, but dulls its action or else brings it down from a higher to a lower level, e.g. from the intuition to the higher mind or from the higher to the lower ranges of overmind. For some time it resists the completeness of the siddhi. It is only when the most material and the subconscient and the environmental consciousness ...
... Universal Forces No, they [ the hostile forces ] do not create universal forces; they are themselves moved by them and move them. The Hostile Forces and the Spiritual Consciousness From the higher mind upwards, all is free from the action of the hostile forces. For they [ the higher planes ] all belong to the spiritual consciousness though with varying degrees of light and power and completeness ...
... working, extending the power of the Light not only to its own but to lower levels of consciousness in their climb towards self-transcendence. Overmind, Intuition, Illumined Mind and what I have called Higher Mind, these and other levels of a spiritualised and liberated mentality, will be able to reflect in the uplifted human mind and its purified and exalted feeling and force of life and action something ...
... There is a further limitation or change of characteristic action at each step downwards from Overmind to Intuition, from Intuition to Illumined Mind, from Illumined Mind to what I have called the Higher Mind: the Mind of Light is a transitional passage by which we can pass from supermind and superhumanity to an illumined humanity. For the new humanity will be capable of at least a partly divinised way ...
... knowledge. Already in the process of spiritualisation it will have begun to pass out of the brilliant poverty of the human intellect; it will mount successively into the pure broad reaches of a higher mind, and next into the gleaming belts of a still greater free Intelligence illumined with a Light from above. At this point it will begin to feel more freely, admit with a less mixed response the radiant ...
... this experience that later on I founded my philosophy. . . . The other source of my philosophy was the knowledge that flowed from above when I sat in meditation, especially from the level of the Higher Mind when I reached that level. . . . This source was exceedingly catholic and many-sided and all sorts of ideas came in which might have belonged to conflicting philosophies but they were here reconciled ...
... sees the world not in terms of life and body but of mind; it is that 2 which, when we get back to it, we sometimes mistake for the pure spirit as we mistake the dynamic mind for the soul. This higher mind is able to perceive and deal with other souls as other forms of its pure self; it is capable of sensing them by pure mental impact and communication and no longer only by vital and nervous impact ...
... it by the spirit and to contain its action without spilling and wasting it or itself getting cracked. It must be capable of being filled and powerfully used by whatever intensity of spiritual or higher mind or life force without any part of the mechanical instrument being agitated, upset, broken or damaged by the inrush or pressure,—as the brain, vital health or moral nature are often injured in those ...
... physical sense and body for some action, conscious vital craving and desire. There is a side of receptive response, a side of dynamic reaction. These things get their proper normal use when the higher mind is not mechanically subject to them, but controls and regulates their action. But a still higher state is when they undergo a certain transformation by the conscious will of the spirit which gives ...
... know it! It's as if something had been reversed. ( silence ) If we could explain this difference of understanding, it would explain the difference between the mental functioning (even the higher mind, the highest intellectual functioning) and the functioning of the divine Consciousness.... I feel it, but... ( Mother tries to explains, then gives up ). The mental functioning explains—it explains ...
... "with the field, the combinations, the character and shades of the colour, the play of forces": red = physical; orange = supramental in the physical; yellow = thinking mind; green = life; blue = higher mind; violet = divine compassion or grace; gold = divine Truth; white = the light of the Mother, or the Divine Consciousness. (See also Agenda IV , May 18, 1963 .) ...
... Aurobindo does one find precise and extended accounts not only of the in-worlds but also of the worlds above the mental level - the "overhead" planes which Sri Aurobindo distinguishes and describes as Higher Mind, Illumined Mind, Intuition. Overmind and, beyond the last-named, the still unmanifested Supermind which is the dynamic face and front of the utter Absolute? Isn't there the greatest possibility, ...
... Sri Aurobindo's Comment "I think it is one of your best. I could not very definitely say from where the inspiration comes. It seems to come from the Illumination through the Higher Mind—but there is an intuitive touch here and there, even some indirect touch of 'mental Overmind' vision hanging about the first stanza. "There are two ranges of Overmind which might be called ...
... import could not be transmitted or what was seized was its reflection in the several grades between it and the mental level - grades distinguished by Sri Aurobindo from that level upwards as Higher Mind, Illumined Mind, Intuition, Overmind. On each of these levels the Spirit has an organised existence in which it is self-revealed, each carries something of which our universe seems a half-lit ...
... Reality". The Latin word "super", as used by Sri Aurobindo, has a particular significance which emerges with unique force once we look at his table of what is above the mind. He speaks of the Higher Mind, the Illumined Mind, the Intuitive Mind, the Overmind, and then the Supermind. The word "super" does not indiscriminately cover all these levels. It acquires, as distinguished from the word ...
... t Reality". The Latin word "super", as used by Sri Aurobindo, has a particular significance which emerges with unique force once we look at his table of what is above the mind. He speaks of the Higher Mind, the Illumined Mind, the Intuition, the Overmind and then the Supermind. The word "super" does not indiscriminately cover all these levels. It acquires, as distinguished from the word "over", a shade ...
... Rigveda and the Upa-nishads. Once Sri Aurobindo had put its source a little lower — in the Intuition-plane which is third in the "overhead" levels from the Mind proper, the intervening two being the Higher Mind and the Illumined Mind; but later he raised its origin to the Overmind, saying that since his first judgment he had himself moved more Page 57 intimately in "the fields of sleep" ...
... levels of style correspond to the levels of inspiration in the sense of planes. He touches on the idea that the adequate style might be said to be the mental style, the effective the style of the Higher Mind, the illumined the style of the Illumined Mind, the inspired the style of the Intuition, and the sheer inevitable the style of the Overmind. But he adds that it is not always possible to affirm this ...
... is the sceptical temper, the temper Page 23 of the inquirer, the true scientist, the untrammelled thinker. The interference of prejudgment and predilection means bondage and until the higher mind has shaken off these fetters, it is not free; it works in chains, it sees in blinkers. This is as true of the materialist refusing to consider spiritualism and occultism as it is of the religionist ...
... be done through the mind; for the thinking mind can only form some inadequate and quite abstract conception of an Absolute or a supreme Person or an impersonal Principle or Presence. And even the higher mind that experiences returns only a pale reflection of Sachchidananda which it takes for that Ineffable or a vague sense of the Eternal or the Infinite. It cannot lay hold upon That and it cannot enter ...
... pleasure. Still even what can be done within the limits of our human consciousness brings a great liberation. But even to do that little is not easy to the physical mind of man, even when his higher mind and will consent and demand it. There is something in us wedded to ignorance, eternally in revolt against all surrender, attached to its own blind activity, its own freedom of will, a "freedom" that ...
... different reasons, the feeling that... things don't move, nothing gets done, nothing changes... you know, that all your efforts are useless; or else, for a few who do not have a sufficiently developed higher mind, they don't have faith: they think, "Oh, it's all promises, but..." ( vague gesture, up above ). You are saved from that difficulty by the fact that up above you understand fully. But that's very ...
... awareness of the state it is in, if, at the same time, there weren't the key to get out (the key hasn't been found yet), or the assurance that we will get out. I'm not speaking of things of the higher mind, because there the key to the way out was found long ago, a long time ago: I mean down below, in the material world—the material world. That's why all those people, like the old man last night, go ...
... which must be truly blue, not too light, but it must be a bright blue. Not too light Page 143 because there are three consecutive blues: there is the blue of the Mind, and then comes the Higher Mind, which is paler, and then the Illumined Mind, which is the color of the flag [Mother's flag], a silver blue, but naturally paler than that. And after this comes yellow, a yellow that is the yellow ...
... Matter? Because they do have a power over Matter. Because it's very material—the brain is material! It's just a little less mechanical than the cellular mind. But it Is material; it isn't the higher mind, certainly: it's a mind confined to the body ( same gesture to the temples ). But the mind I was speaking of, the body-mind, is EVERYWHERE, in every cell: every cell has it within it; whereas that ...
... reads a passage from his manuscript in which he mentions the difference in luminosity of the various planes of consciousness. Mother interrupts him to add: ) Somewhere in the overmind (beyond the higher mind and from the overmind onwards), things are luminous IN THEMSELVES. Light doesn't have to strike them: things themselves are luminous. And this makes a considerable difference in vision. Things are ...
... in view the Dark Well poems when I wrote about Harin. I was thinking of his ordinary way of writing. If I remember right , the Dark Well poems came from the inner mind centre, some from the Higher Mind-other planes may have sent their message to his mind to put in poetic speech, but the main worker was the poetic intelligence which took what was given and turned it into something very vivid, ...
... of godhead. "I don't think there is any co-ordination between the differences of style and the different planes of inspiration—unless one can say that the effective style comes from the higher mind, illumined from the illumined mind, the inspired from the plane of intuition. But I don't know whether that would stand at all times—especially when each style reaches its inevitable power." ...
... perfect—it is all of one piece, an exceedingly fine poem expressing with revelatory images the consciousness of the cosmic Self into which one enters by breaking the walls of individual limitation. Higher Mind, touched with Illumined Mind, except lines 3,4, 8, 9 which are more of the Illumined Mind itself." Asked what exactly was meant in line 3 by the phrase "that breaks through form", Sri Aurobindo ...
... pure Sun-blossom fragrant with eternity— Eagles of rapture lifting flickerless A golden trance wide-winged on golden air. Sri Aurobindo's Comment "It comes from the higher mind except for the fourth and eighth lines which have illumination and are very fine." Page 23 ...
... Comment "That is extraordinarily fine throughout. But it is too fine for any need of remarks. Lines 3,4,5, also 10,11,12,13,14, Illumined Mind with Overmind Intuition touch—the rest Higher Mind suffused with Illumined Mind." * (The Muse is again away and I am feeling impatient. Can't you give me some clue about the direction of consciousness by which I may draw her back ...
... An empty throne of gold awaiting us. Sri Aurobindo's Comment "It is more mental than usual—but the vision and expression are there. The first stanza is the most powerful, a Higher Mind movement; lines 7, 8 belong to the same category—though, as I say, the mental strain is more pronounced than it has been in recent poems. The other lines are colourful and imaginative. "Its ...
... present context he seems to take the style of the Illumined Mind to be ipso facto that which he has called "illumined" there. And the implication is that "the effective" is the style of the Higher Mind. But, if so, the "inspired" style would cover the lines described her e as "intuitive" . (K.D.S.) Page 97 ...
... superhuman trance. Sri Aurobindo's Comment "Lines five to eight (marked double) are from the Illumined Mind touched with the Intuition—the rest seem to be mainly from the Higher Mind, except that the last two [marked double] have a force of Illumination also. Perhaps the sustained intensity is less than that of your very best poems: that does not mean that it is a semi-success—it ...
... heaven's truth-core flames the will! Sri Aurobindo's Comment "The Tartar day and Negro night have vividness and power; the other lines are very fine poetry. As a whole, the Higher Mind with a touch of Illumination." * Page 105 ...
... transient pauper day but shadowless dawn, Eternal Truth's sun-gated infinite. Sri Aurobindo's Comment "It is mental throughout except the last line which has a touch of Higher Mind; but it is fine all the same. Quite up to the mark." Page 104 ...
... all the planes, briefly characterising them. It starts with the "inconscient" physical, then proceeds to the vital and the mental, with the psychic innermost recess between them—then sums up the Higher Mind, the Illumined Mind and the Intuition and finally goes to the Overmind, the Supermind and the unmanifest Absolute. Do you think a special key is necessary to explain the poem or does it possess ...
... the Overhead planes, the hidden ranges of conscious- ness above the intellect, with their inherent light of knowledge and their natural experience of the infinite. He distinguished four planes: Higher Mind, Illumined Mind, Intuition, Over-mind. The last-named has been, according to him, the top reach of the dynamic side of man's spirituality so far: a transcendental poise of immutable Brahman or f ...
... absolutely egoless, without any personal reaction, nothing; there was nothing but the consciousness of the Supreme Action. It was the only thing existing. And of course, the whole ordinary and higher mind (as well as the physical mind, it goes without saying, for that must be abolished before going into trance), everything here in the head, above the head, around the head—absolutely immobile. After ...
... tunes keenly critical, offered by Sri Aurobindo while assessing the "overhead” poetry of Amal Kiran. However, implicit in this approach that affirms various levels of inspiration such as the "Higher Mind," "Illumined Mind," "Intuitive Mind," "Overmind" ( The Secret Splendour, p. 81) or the one that defines poetic speech in terms of "Adequate," " Effective," "Intuitive,” "Illuminative," ...
... and help them to integrate their lives in the world with its focus on materialism and the vital life? The word “spiritual” is often used in a loose manner. Generally people take it to mean a higher mind and life in an elementary way but not necessarily a “spiritual” way. Spiritual means the way of the spirit and nothing else. Very few people know what their spirit is. They know they have a soul ...
... the influence and receive the direct utterance of poetry. It was possible to be receptive to it without myself getting stationed on those higher levels. Sri Aurobindo distinguished these levels as higher mind, illumined mind, intuitive mind and overmind intuition. He considered these planes as being communicated by us through our poems. The sheer overmind was difficult to tap and examples of the sheer ...
... mind and possessing an inherent light of knowledge and a natural experience of the Infinite. He distinguished in general a progression of four levels as expressible at present in poetry (or prose): Higher Mind, Page 126 Illumined Mind, Intuition, Overmind. Savitri was intended to be on the whole the poetry of Overmind, akin on a massive scale to what the ancient Rishis had called the ...
... roots were not deep enough. About his best mystical creations during the three years of stay in the Ashram, Sri Aurobindo says that Harin's "poems came from the inner mind centre, some from the Higher Mind - other planes may have sent their message to his mind to put in poetic speech, but the main worker was the poetic intelligence which took what was given and turned it into something very vivid, ...
... superiority, demand or desire. For if these elements are there, then it is not the true thing. 5) Most, even in doing Yoga, live in mind, vital, physical, lit up occasionally or to some extent by the higher mind and by the illumined mind; but to prepare for the Supramental change it is necessary (as soon as, personally the time has come) to open up to the intuitive and the overmind, so that these may make ...
... stumbling or deviation into error the rush of lights, powers and experiences from the Supraphysical planes. An entire perfection in these respects is hardly possible until the whole nature from the higher mind to the subconscient physical is made one in the light that is greater than Mind, but a sufficient foundation and a consciousness always self-observant, vigilant and growing in these things is in ...
... "There is no question of jugglery about it. What is not true is not supramental. As for calm and silence, there is no need of the supramental to get that. One gets it even on the level of the Higher Mind which is the next, above the human intelligence. I got these things in 1908 twenty-seven years ago, and I can assure you they were solid and marvellous enough in all conscience without any need ...
... one can get mukti but not perfection or transformation (except a relative psycho-spiritual change)." 2 The descent of the spiritual potencies and forces of the higher planes (from the Higher Mind to the Overmind) is thus the third necessary motion following the other two of ascension and permanent stationing above. In this process of percolation, downpour or influx, occur "an increasing ...
... planes of consciousness that offer the pilgrim soul an ever hightening and deepening power of sight. These planes, "Exposed to the lustre of Infinity," 91 are in the ascending order: (i) the Higher Mind, whose action, in terms of the Vedic image of the Sun of Truth, is of the nature of "a composed and steady sunshine" 92 , 86. Savitri, Book I, Canto IV, p. 53. 87. Ibid., Book X, Canto ...
... Mother's Symbol Sri Aurobindo's letter also indicated the meaning of the colours: Red — Physical Orange — Supramental in the physical Yellow — Thinking Mind Green — Life Blue — Higher Mind Violet — Divine Compassion or Grace White — The Light of the Mother or the Divine Consciousness Gold — Divine Truth On 3.4.56 the Mother asked me to decorate many idols which were in ...
... Colours The golden light is the light of the Divine Truth which comes out from the supramental sunlight and modified according to the level it crosses, creates the ranges from overmind to higher Mind. Sri Aurobindo, Letters on Yoga - III: Colours ...
... mistaken: In the heart it is a psychic contact; above the head it is a mental contact. 10 September 1936 Page 140 In what part of the mind is Your presence found? The higher mind. What is the difference in effect between Your presence in the heart and above the body? No difference in its effect. 11 September 1936 I don't know why, but I am unable to eat ...
... down from this supreme Height, there is all the play of the various influences ( gesture of mixture and conflict ) and that in itself is a sure sign: even a slight descent―even into the domain of higher mind, higher intelligence―and the whole conflict of influences begins. Only what is right at the very summit and is perfectly pure, has this power of spontaneous conviction. Therefore, whatever one may ...
... think this path is an instant miracle.' After speaking of the descent of the Supermind, he said that an INTERMEDIARY must be prepared between our present mental state (even the most elevated higher mind) and the supramental region, because if one entered directly into Gnosis, well, it would produce such an abrupt change that our physical constitutions would be unable to support it—an intermediary ...
... man on the way to becoming superman, or those that the supramental being will possess when he appears on earth? In the first case, they are the faculties that develop in man as he opens to the higher mind and overmind, and through those Page 236 regions he receives the light of the Truth. These faculties are not a direct expression of the supreme Truth, but a transcription, an indirect ...
... forgotten completely. There were very interesting things.... Some of them give me the feeling that they are a kind of transcription (one might say "intellectual", but it is not that, it is a mentalised higher mind, that is to say, it is accessible to thought) of the experience of the supramental consciousness that I had, in which this difference of good and evil and all that, appears as childishness, and Sri ...
... of the action taking place, the joy of looking, this joy everywhere, but me?—Nothing, no one, gone. Only later, afterwards, did I see what had happened, for everything had disappeared, even the higher mind that understands and organizes things (by 'understand' I mean contain, which 'contains' things). That also was gone. And this lasted the entire distribution. Only when that [the body] had gone back ...
... more or less complete identifications, according to certain bodily functions—I don't know. And beneath, there are still old undercurrents of mental influence, from what we are used to calling the "higher" mind (intuitive mind and so on). And then, all around, a whole play of forces, suggestions, formations, which comes from outside. I say "from outside," but there's no sense of "outside"; there's no such ...
... Will you go and see? If it still exists, will you bring it? That would be amusing. ( Sujata goes out ) ( silence ) I'll try. That place where I used to see you was an experience of the higher mind, just above the mind, and since the mind left I have stopped having that experience. But this, here [the physical level] is fully active, fully. I'll try. ( Sujata comes back with cardboard boxes ...
... all its secret majesty to your soul - a glorious night connecting and communicating with your dream-depths, your psychic centre. The immediate overhead plane was what Sri Aurobindo has called the Higher Mind, the first link between our normal self and the levels of existence that are above it. The deep blue colour is indicative of this plane and the thin white-blue border is the sign of the planes beyond ...
... a cocoon of peace. And then if in this mind, too, which vibrates and vibrates, fidgets all the time (really like a monkey), if you can bring into it... it's a Peace that doesn't come through the higher mind: it's a Peace that acts DIRECTLY in this material vibration—a Peace in which everything relaxes. Don't think—don't think you have to transform this physical mind or oblige it to fall silent or ...
... Overhead planes, the hidden ranges of consciousness above the intellect, with their inherent light of knowledge and their natural experience of the infinite. He broadly distinguished four planes: Higher Mind, Illumined Mind, Intuition, Overmind. The last-named has been, according to him, the highest reach of the dynamic side of man's spirituality so far. The master dynamism of the Divine, the integral ...
... hasn't come into my hands. You may be interested to know that Sri Aurobindo adopted Einstein's expression: "boundless finite". In Savitri, after describing in brief all the "overhead" planes - Higher Mind, Illumined Mind, Intuition - up to Overmind he begins the description of the Overmind: Then stretches the boundless finite's last expanse, The cosmic empire of the Overmind, Time's ...
... Overhead Poetry is poetry which passes over everybody's head! (laughter) But how is one to receive an inspiration entirely new which comes from the planes which Sri Aurobindo has distinguished as Higher Mind, Illumined Mind, Intuition, Overmind? So I once got the idea to make a very direct appeal to Sri Aurobindo. I pressed on him a singular request, emboldened by his innumerable favours of tutorship ...
... called the Overhead planes, the hidden ranges of consciousness above the intellect, with their inherent light of knowledge and their natural experience of the infinite. He distinguished four planes: Higher Mind, Illumined Mind, Intuition, Overmind. The last-named has been, according to him, the top reach of the dynamic side of man's spirituality so far: a transcendental poise of immutable Brahman or featureless ...
... the world not in terms of life and body but of mind; it is that 1 which, when we get back to it, we sometimes mistake for the pure spirit as we mistake the dynamic mind for the soul. This higher mind is able to perceive and deal with other souls as other forms of its pure self; it is capable of sensing them by pure mental impact and communication and no longer only by vital and nervous impact ...
... conveys, capable too of feeling the Overhead touch when it comes." 62 The Overmind touch, even the touch of anything else Overhead (which comprises all the above-mind states of consciousness: Higher Mind, Illumined Mind, 60 Ibid., pp. 788-90. 61 Ibid., p. 743. 62 lbid., p. 759. Page 302 Intuition) must involve, in some measure at least, a "cosmic cons ...
... -9- The 9th movement comes under the sign of Sagittarius. It is the sign of understanding, of prophecy, of vision. Like the third sign in which the mind emerges, this sign of the higher mind is a dual sign, reflected in the movement 246-275: the tension is depicted between Savitri's outer and inner nature, and between her inner self and those with whom she is in contact. The foreknowledge ...
... etc.) cannot even begin to explain the extraordinary series of transformations that brought forth life from matter and mind from life, and that is destined to bring forth, in just the same way, higher mind and overmind and supermind: Spirit alone can account for the astonishment that is the glory of evolution. Likewise, there is nothing that authentic religion should fear in the notion of evolution ...
... the seeings of the Absolute, Sows the Idea's significance in Form And from that seed the growths of Time arise. 60 But Aswapati also begins to understand the limitations of the higher mind. Although it receives the higher truth, it is has no power to transmit it to the lower parts of man's being—his little mind, life and gross matter. In fact, these lower members dismiss this truth ...
... therefore be no question of jugglery about it. What is not true is not supramental. As for calm and silence, there is no need of the supramental to get that. One can get it even on the level of Higher Mind which is the next above the human intelligence. I got these things in 1908, twenty seven years ago and I can assure you they were solid enough and marvellous enough without any need of supramentality ...
... very glad to get your letter and the beautiful poem and know that the disturbance is over. These things come across, but they cannot prevent the destined fulfilment. Let the mind fall quiet and the higher Mind come down into you with its light, peace, wideness and openness direct and large to the Divine. December 1933 I don't belittle intelligence at all. It is the claims of the intellect ...
... to the methods and processes; these are presented towards the end of the dialogue with Nachiketas. Yama says: "When the five senses cease and are at rest and the mind rests with them and the higher mind ceases from its workings, that is the highest state, say thinkers. The state unperturbed when the senses are imprisoned in the mind, of this they say "It is Yoga". Then man becomes very vigilant ...
... still, according to Sri Aurobindo, higher levels of consciousness, ranges of the powers of the fourfold personality in the superconscious. These ranges are those of what Sri Aurobindo has termed the Higher Mind, the Illumined Mind, Intuitive Mind, Overmind and Supermind. An account of all this would form a subject by itself, and in an introductory paper as this we cannot dare enter into this field. ...
... religious import but in its deeper pursuit of knowledge relating to what the Vedas call Prithvi, the earth, Antariksha, subtle levels of existence between matter and mind, Dyau, the plane of the higher mind, Svah, the world of light, and Surya, the world of everlasting day or of the supramental light, and still beyond, of the transcendental unity and oneness. For Veda is essentially and es ...
... therefore, the indivisible infinite reality is to be Page 65 reflected indivisibly and infinitely, the reflecting medium has to rise to levels higher than that of mind, such as the levels of higher' mind, illumined mind, intuitive mind, overmind and supermind. It is only at me level of the supermind that the integral experience of the infinite and the indivisible is obtained in its full infinity ...
... different traditions, but in the latest classification which has been presented by Sri Aurobindo, these levels are distinguished from each other and described in an ascending order starting from Higher Mind and rising up to Illumined Mind, Intuitive Mind, Overmind and Supermind. The subconscious and inconscience are states of involved consciousness, not itself aware of all that is involved but it acts ...
... Supramental Transformation The process of ascent to the supermind from the mind and the descent of the supermind, which would transform successively the Overmind, Intuitive mind, Illumined mind, Higher mind, mind and the rest cannot be a logical series of separate segments. Sri Aurobindo has stated that while a sufficient integration of one status has to be complete before an ascent to the next higher ...
... above the physical world, there is a Vital world, above that is a world of the Mind, and then there are several planes between the Mind world and the world of the Super-mind; these are worlds of Higher Mind, Illumined Mind, Intuitive Mind and Over-mind. On the top level, there are worlds of the Super-mind, of Bliss, of Consciousness and of Existence. In the various descriptions of the universe, there ...
... according to Sri Aurobindo, higher levels of consciousness, ranges of the powers of the fourfold personality in the superconscious. These ranges are those of what Sri Aurobindo has termed the higher Mind, the Illumined Min, Intuitive Mind, Overmind and Supermind. An account of all this would form a subject by itself, and in an introductory paper as this we cannot dare enter into this field. ...
... Nescience will infructify the action of any intervening Force that seeks to effect a radical transformation. Even the higher spiritual-mental powers such as those whom Sri Aurobindo has named the Higher Mind, the Illumined Mind, the Intuitive Mind and the Overmind, and their intensities, entering into the substance of this inconscient foundation, undergo this inescapable disability and fail to annul ...
... were three carriages my mind interpreted them as three planes. But you say that one of the carriages is the psychic. That is not one of the higher planes. The higher planes are the higher mind, illumined, intuitive, overmind, supermind. The psychic, mind, vital, physical belong to the ordinary manifestation. I am afraid my interpretation of the carriage with three horses ...
... The useless mechanical mind is very active, while the useful recording mind has fallen silent; it can't do any thinking or even note down the experiences! Perhaps it is waiting for a higher mind to act from above. How is it that when I talk with someone, with whom I do not usually converse, his thoughts and ideas hover round my mind for a long time? It is the nature ...
... whole affair (unintelligible as in his case to anybody but myself) and am working it out figure by figure. As for people, no! they are not floating in the supramental—some are floating in the higher mind, others rushing up into it and flopping down into the subconscient alternately, are swinging from heaven into hell and back into heaven, again back into hell ad infinitum, some are sticking fast ...
... The throat centre (externalising, expressing mind, the physical mind) and the 'ajnachakra' between the eyebrows, centre of inner thought, will and vision. Are our higher levels — Higher Mind, Illumined Mind, Intuition, Overmind, Supermind—automatically in connection with the Divine? Of course, but you can hardly call them your levels, since you are not conscious of them and ...
... difficulty does the psychic being find in coming forward and governing my nature? Your nature has always been very self-centred and the mind active - in such a nature it is easier for the higher mind to act than for the psychic. You wrote, "It must be that it is easier for the nature to open the psychic from above than directly." Is it not a defect in the nature not to be able to ...
... into a stairway of four main ascents, each with its high level of fulfilment. These gradations maybe summarily described as a series of sublimations of the consciousness through Higher Mind, Illumined Mind and Intuition into Overmind and beyond it; there is a succession of self-transmutations at the summit of which lies the Supermind or Divine Gnosis. 106 Whereas ...
... die-hard views will always protest and cry that it is a mesalliance, a misjoinder to couple together Matter and Consciousness or even Life and Consciousness. But since the light has touched the higher mind even among page 215 a few of the positivist type, the few may .very well be the precursor of the order of the day. After all, only one bold step is needed: to affirm unequivocally ...
... 2 Ashwapati now passes into the higher luminous regions. He enters regions of larger, breath and wider movement—the higher vital and then into the yet more luminous region of the higher mind. He reaches the heavens where immortal sages and the divinities and the gods themselves dwell. Even these Ashwapati finds to be only partial truths, various aspects, true but limited, of the One ...
... is godly, the other asuric. As the divine he is Brahman, as the Asura, Aham. So man occupies a central place in the scheme of the universe. Above him are stationed the gods, the region of the higher mind and the heart, below him upon the earth rule the Asuras, the powers of the lower mind and the vital. In between is man, the intermediary being. The gods and the Asuras are in eternal struggle ...
... which men have not, but they lack this direct Divine Presence which is quite exceptional, which is a fact of the earth and is found nowhere else. All these inhabitants of the higher worlds, of Higher Mind and Overmind and other regions do not possess a psychic being. Naturally, the beings of the vital world do not have it either. They do not regret it, they do not want it. In their origin ...
... into the mind and begins its purificatory work there— although it is always the inner heart which first recognises the Divine Presence and gives its assent to the Divine action—for the mind, the higher mind that is to say, is the summit of the ordinary human consciousness and receives more easily and readily the Radiances that descend. From the Mind the Light filters into the denser regions of the emotions ...
... concretised itself gradually through various steps and stages of a diminishing power of expression or an increasing entropy of self-concealment: the main grades being the Supermind, the Overmind, the Higher Mind, the Mind, Life and lastly the body or Matter. Having arrived at the extreme end that Matter represents,—the farthest apparently from the original source,—the movement turns round and seeks to go ...
... its centre in the solar plexus. The other is supramental and its centre is above the head. You act in ordinary life with the help of the first. In meditation your consciousness goes back into the higher mind. The silence aspired for, is not for itself, but only in order to let this higher force descend and rejoin the other. The old allegory of the climbing fire and the descending Sun. But your mind is ...
... attack you. Secondly, it is not the highest Supramental Power itself that is working in the beginning. It presses Page 224 down upon the mind and through the movement of the Higher Mind it shows the ignorance and the imperfections. Disciple : How are we to get rid of these difficulties ? Sri Aurobindo : First of all, you have to remain calm ; that is, establish perfect ...
... some of them may look upon the outer nature as a child behaving as it wants, and not bother to harmonise it with the inner being. There is also the danger of self-deception. A Yogi may go into the Higher Mind, perhaps even touch the Overmind, and yet have a sexual fall. He may think he is guided by an inner divine voice and attempt to justify his erratic behaviour by saying he is only obeying that voice ...
... 10 JUNE 1940 SATYENDRA: Will there be any hierarchy among the supramental beings? SRI AUROBINDO: Supramental beings? In the Overhead, there is a hierarchy: Higher Mind, Illumined Mind, Intuition and so on. PURANI: That includes the Overmind. SRI AUROBINDO: Yes, among the supramental beings too there is a hierarchy, in the sense of a gradation of consciousness ...
... within and (4) vaikharī, the articulate word. In modern language we may say that the first one is the self-vibration of the Supreme Being or Consciousness; the second is the vibration of the higher-mind or the pure intelligence; the third is the vibration of the inner heart; and the fourth the vibration of physical sound, of voice. In philosophical terms of current English we may name these ...
... through various steps and stages of a diminishing power of expression or an Page 27 increasing entropy of self-concealment: the main grades being the Supermind, the Overmind, the Higher Mind, the Mind, Life and lastly the body or Matter. Having arrived at the extreme end that Matter represents, – the farthest apparently from the original source,-the movement turns round and seeks to ...
... into the mind and begins its purificatory work there although it is always the inner heart which first recognises the Divine Presence and gives its assent to the Divine action-for the mind, the higher mind that is to say, is the summit of the ordinary human consciousness and receives more easily and readily the Radiances that descend. From the Mind the Light filters into the denser regions of the emotions ...
... Cosmic Spirit correspond, to the experience of the Overmind? SRI AUROBINDO: Yes; but you can have the experience of the Cosmic Consciousness on any level. Generally you have it on the level of the Higher Mind where you feel the two aspects—dynamic and the static—as separate. But as you go above, you find the Overmind arching over all other levels and the two aspects are gathered together in it and combined ...
... qualities which men have not, but they lack this direct Divine Presence which is quite exceptional, which is a fact of the earth and is found nowhere else. All these inhabitants of the higher worlds, of Higher Mind and Overmind and other regions do not possess a psychic being. Naturally, the beings of the vital world do not have it either. They do not regret it, they do not want it. In their origin, of course ...
... heaven's gates.² Ashwapati now passes into the higher luminous regions. He enters regions of larger breath and wider movement – the higher vital and then into the yet more luminous region of the higher mind. He reaches the heavens where immortal sages and the divinities and the gods themselves dwell. Even these Ashwapati finds to be only partial truths, various aspects, true but limited, of the One ...
... In another letter of the same year: "The poem was originally written from a lower level, a mixture perhaps of the inner mind, psychic, poetic intelligence, sublimised vital, afterwards with the Higher Mind, often illumined and intuitivised, intervening. Most of the stuff of the first Book is new or else the old so altered as to be no more what it was; the best of the old has sometimes been kept almost ...
... middle receives or is touched and influenced with great difficulty and after long travail, but the bottom portion is rarely connected or contacted, only nominally perhaps. In other words, if the higher mind, the intellect and intelligence is somewhat illumined with a new light from above and even if the higher vital comes under its influence in a general way, the lower vital comes hardly in its grasp ...
... general level of the being and consciousness, that is to say, its expression and its field of action should be lifted and raised to a higher potency of poise – the higher the better – towards the higher mind, towards the overmental – and beyond. The Divine Presence in the heart – the central psychic – should not only be felt constantly there in the heart but in all other parts or levels of the being: ...
... conveys, capable too of feeling the Overhead touch when it comes". 69 The Overmind touch, even the touch of anything else 'overhead' (which comprises all the above-mind states of consciousness: Higher Mind, Illumined Mind, Intuition) must involve, in some measure at least, a "cosmic consciousness", a background consciousness to which the million particulars of phenomenal life perceived by the mind ...
... and evil, 432; the turn towards Knowledge, 433; from Ignorance to Knowledge, 434; Karma and rebirth, 434; dynamics of spirituality, 434; ascent towards Supermind, 436ff; steps of ascent, 436ff; higher mind, illumined mind, intuition, overmind, 436-7; emergence of Gnostic being, 437ff; current evolutionary crisis, 438; Mind of light, 439; a Manifesto for the Future, 440; tributes, 440; synthesis of ...
... even those with a pronounced philosophical slant, are not - strictly speaking - mystical outpourings. The poems have come - to use the phraseology of his later writings - from the levels of the Higher Mind or the Illumined Mind, perhaps even of the Intuitive Mind, and give us only philosophical generalisations or images of vividly perceived facets of the truth. Sri Aurobindo himself has remarked that ...
... working extending the power of the Light not only to its own but to lower levels of consciousness in their climb towards self-transcendence. Overmind, Intuition, Illumined Mind and what I have called Higher Mind, these and other levels of a spiritualised and liberated .mentality, will be able to reflect in the uplifted human mind and its purified and exalted feeling and force of life and action something ...
... There is a further limitation or change of characteristic action at each step downwards from Overmind to Intuition, from Intuition to Illumined Mind, from Illumined Mind to what I have called the Higher Mind: the Mind of Light is a transitional passage by Which we can pass from supermind and superhumanity to an . illumined humanity. For the new humanity will be capable of at least a partly divinised ...
... how this could be achieved. The ascent from Ignorance to Knowledge will be long and slow, and there must be many gradations on the way. In order to reach the Supermind, many levels above the Mind—Higher Mind, Illumined Mind, Intuition, Overmind—will have to be passed. But it can be done, and will be done, leading, "inevitably towards an evolution in the Knowledge, a self-finding and self-unfolding of ...
... therefore be no question of jugglery about it. What is not true is not supramental. As for calm and silence, there is no need of the supramental to get that. One can get it even on the level of Higher Mind which is the next above the human intelligence. I got these things in 1908, 27 years ago, and I can assure you they were solid enough and marvellous enough in all conscience without any need of ...
... a .supreme spiritual status or a higher existence."² The opening within has to be supplemented by an opening above. The consciousness of the sâdhaka has to ascend .above the human mind into the Higher mind, the Illumined mind, the plane of Intuition and the Overmind, .and receive from them the transmuting light and force peculiar to them. This ascent may not take place if he ¹ The Life Divine ...
... integral dynamic ideal that was in the background of the Upanishadic verses :— "Know the body for a chariot and the soul for the master of the driving, the lower mind for the reins and the higher mind for the charioteer who driveth. "The senses are the steeds of the soul and the objects of their action are the paths in which they gallop; for there is one who is yoked with soul and mind ...
... is a shadow...."¹ For a complete elimination of the ego-sense and the sporadic recurrence of its reflex action in the Subconscient, one has then to rise into the Overmind which is beyond the Higher Mind, Illumined Mind and the plane of Intuition, and bring down the Overmind gnosis into the Subconscient and the Inconscient. The Overmental widening of consciousness is a global universalisation, and ...
... the divine life in humanity, for by that rending, by the illumining descent of the higher into the nature of the lower being and the forceful ascent of the lower being into the nature of the higher, mind can recover its divine light in the all-comprehending Supermind, the soul realise its divine self in the all-possessing all-blissful Ananda, life possess its divine power in the play of omnipotent ...
... play of vacant forms in the impersonal universality of the Absolute Brahman."¹ "As for calm and silence, there is no need of the supramental to get that. One can get it even on the level of Higher Mind which is the next above the human intelligence. I got these things in 1908, 27 years ago, and I can assure you they were solid enough and marvellous enough in all conscience without any need of ...
... behold Him, but to the heart and themind and the supermind He is manifest. Who know Him are the immortals. ( 9 ) When the five senses cease and are at rest and the mind restswith them and the higher mind ceases from its workings, that is the highest state, say thinkers. ( 10 ) Yea, when all the strings of the heart are rent asunder, evenhere, in this human birth, then the mortal becomes immortal ...
... same essence as God and is other than body, life and mind. Further, Consciousness, descended into and self-hidden in the Inconscient, progressively manifests itself. Another way of stating it is that it evolves its own higher levels which brings xiii about the emergence of Matter, Life and Mind in the world. The evolution of Mind, or mental beings, is a stage in this process of the... the supreme Reality. The process is continuing and is in travail of the manifestation of a level of consciousness higher than mind, for mind is a power which is a seeker of knowledge, and in so far as it has knowledge it is partial and even that too it does not properly possess. The higher level of consciousness which is in the process of manifestation is termed the Supermind by Sri Aurobindo. It is... Consciousness-Force. As Consciousness-Force it manifests itself on many levels. It is life in plants, instinct in insects and animals, mental intelligence, will and feeling in human beings and powers higher than mind in yogis and mystics. It has the power of self-determination and self-limitation. By the exercise of this power it becomes determinate things. By self-limitation it seems to become progressively ...
... is the small physical vital which takes only an interest in the small and trivial things of the ordinary daily and social life and nothing else. When formerly the sadhana was going on on higher levels (mind, higher vital etc.), there was plenty of vigour and verve and interest in the details of the Asram work and life as well as in an inner life; the physical vital was carried in the stream. But for... interest in work or a strong interest in sadhana, then this becomes quiescent. That is the malady. Its remedy is to keep the right condition and to bring gradually or, if one can, swiftly the light of the higher aspiration into this part of the being also, so that whatever the conditions of the environment, it may keep also the right poise. Then the sunlit path should be less impossible. Page 618 ... such as the general increase of cynicism, a refusal to believe in anything at all, a decrease of honesty, an immense corruption, a preoccupation with food, money, comfort, pleasure to the exclusion of higher things and a general expectation of worse and worse things awaiting the world. All that, however acute, is a temporary phenomenon for which those who know anything about the workings of the world-energy ...
... above, by the power of a supramental Light and Force acting through the higher illumined mind and the psychic being. For that purpose she was calling down beings of a higher plane (like the one of which you speak) as an indispensable aid in that process. All went on well enough so long as the work was on the mental, psychic and higher vital levels. But as soon as it began in the lower vital, it appeared ...
... indicate points of light or of higher experience in the consciousness. The earth means the physical consciousness. Stars indicate points of light in the ignorant mental consciousness. Moon = spiritual light Sun = the higher Truth light They [ gold stars in the sky ] are simply indications of divine Truth in the mind—the sky is a symbol of mind very often. The sky is always... always some mental plane. The stars indicate beginnings or promises of Light—the various lights indicating various powers of the consciousness: gold = Truth, blue = higher Page 146 spiritualised mind, violet = sympathy, unity or universal compassion. Fire and Burning The fire indicates a dynamic action. The white fire is the fire of aspiration, the red fire is the fire of re... the light of the Truth, the Moon only reflects the light of the Truth—that is the difference. Golden light means the light of the higher Truth—the moon is the symbol of spirituality. A golden moon means a power of spirituality full of the light of the higher Truth. The moon, as I have already written, indicates spirituality—the crescent form means a commencement of the spiritual light. The ...
... The question very often is put: What has Yoga, or Spirituality, to do with Art? If Yoga enables the human being to attain to a consciousness higher than mind, then Art which can do the same work is naturally connected with it. Art embodies in its forms higher than human consciousness and thus tends to fix it here on the physical plane of consciousness. This work art can do, if the artist has... the intellect, the aesthetic sense and the body—all the three—found a harmonious development. Apollo is the embodiment of that perfection in Sculpture. So, while you work with your hands and eyes your mind should envisage the life of the people who created this art-form. True art is founded upon life, it is not an isolated product existing by itself. Art is the outflovvering of the cultural life of man ...
... it. The former process is the natural action of the mind which has entirely developed in us; the latter is an acquired action, an action of the intellect and the intelligent Page 51 will which represent in Mind an attempt of the mental being to do what can only be done with perfect spontaneity and mastery by something higher than Mind. The intellect and intelligent will form a bridge by... there is a mental world in which Mind and not Matter is the base. There sense would be quite a different thing in its operation. It would feel mentally an image in Mind and throw it out into form in more and more gross substance; and whatever physical formations there might already be in that world would respond rapidly to the Mind and obey its modifying suggestions. Mind would be masterful, creative,... theories about sense and mind and the Brahman. We know of sense only as an action of the organs through which embodied mind communicates with external Matter, and these sense-organs have been separately developed in the course of evolution; the senses therefore are not fundamental things, but only subordinate conveniences and temporary physical functionings of the embodied mind. Brahman, on the other ...
... emotional being; the throat centre, Vishuddha, governs the expressive and externalising mind; the centre between the eye-brows, Agnachakra, governs the dynamic mind, will, vision, mental formation; the thousand-petalled lotus, Sahasradala, above commands the higher thinking mind, houses the still higher illumined mind and at the highest opens to the intuitive through which or else by an over- flooding... se above the human mind that is the higher consciousness. Below from the crown of the head to the throat are the layers (they are many of them) of the mind, the "three principal being one at the top of the head communicating with the higher consciousness, another between the eyebrows where is the thought, sight and will, a third in the throat which is the externalising mind. .A second division... life-forces and the passions and larger desire-movements (4) commanding the higher emotional being with the- psychic deep within it; ( 5 ) commanding expression and externalisation of the mind movements and mental forces; (6) commanding thought, will and vision;( 7 ) commanding the higher thinking mind and the illumined mind and opening upward to intuitive and overmind."5 " When we speak of ...
... But also because man at present lives more in the outward than in the inward, is governed principally by his vital existence, sensations, feelings and customary mentality rather than by his higher thought-mind and feels himself in these to be really alive, really to exist and Page 549 be, while the world of ideas is to him something remote and abstract and, however powerful and interesting... an outcome of the European mind which proceeds characteristically from life-experience to the idea and, without going deeper, returns from the idea upon life in an attempt to change its outward forms and institutions, its order and system. In the European mentality it has taken the shape known currently as internationalism. Internationalism is the attempt of the human mind and life to grow out of the... French Revolution and the struggle that grew around it, was a complete and self-conscious nationalism and not internationalism. During the nineteenth century we see the larger idea growing again in the minds of thinkers, sometimes in a modified form, sometimes in its own pure idealism, till allying itself with the growing forces of socialism and anarchism it took a clear body and a recognisable vital force ...
... with its Celtic originality and psychic delicacy of vision and purpose has entered into this poetic field. It is receiving too for a time an element or at least an embassy and message from the higher spiritual mind and imagination of India. The countries beyond the seas, still absorbed in their material making, have yet to achieve spiritual independence, but once that comes, the poetry of Whitman shows... Anglo-Saxon mind. That has been a source of strength in combination with the finer Celtic imagination and has given English poetry a strong hold on life, but the hold has been also something of a chain continually drawing it back from the height and fullness of some great spiritual attempt to inferior levels. Today however the language is no longer the tongue only of the English people: the Irish mind with... heightening of the flight of the spirit. The change that is at present coming over the mind of the race began with a wider cosmic vision, a sense of the greatness and destiny and possibilities of the individual and the race, the idea of humanity and of the unity of man with man and a closer relation too and unity of his mind with the life of Nature. It is the endeavour to make the expression of these things ...
... creative of all things, we must also grant a divine Mind cognitive of the Word and of all that it expresses. But this is not a sufficient foundation; for the theory of the divine Word presents itself only as a rational possibility. A cognition higher than Mind presents itself on the other hand as a necessity which arises from the very nature of Mind itself, a necessity from which we cannot logically... as a whole to a higher level. For Man, first among Nature's children, has shown the capacity to change himself by his own effort and the conscious aspiration to transcend. These considerations justify to the reason the idea of a Mind beyond our mind, but only as a final evolution out of Matter. The Upanishad, however, enthrones it as the already existing creator and ruler of Mind; it is a secret... the sense in Mind. If, then, such a deeper principle of consciousness exists, it must be that and not mind which is the original and fundamental intention concealed in Nature and which eventually and somewhere must emerge. But is there any reason for supposing that it must emerge here and in Mind, as Mind has emerged in Life and Life in Matter? We answer in the affirmative because Mind has in itself ...
... Serpent Power- says that this lotus "has its head turned downward." Page 324 light around." This centre, said Sri Aurobindo, commands "the higher thinking mind and the illumined mind" and opens "upwards to the intuition and over mind." He clarified that some identify it "with the brain, but that is an error—the brain is only a channel of communication situated between the thousand-petalled... sixteen petals. Its element is Ether. This centre of speech commands "expression and all externalisation of the mind movements and mental forces." 6.ĀJNĀCHAKRA :located on the forehead between but a little above the eyebrows. The lotus is white and has two petals. It "governs the dynamic mind, will, vision, mental formation." In a word all mental faculties . When the third eye opens, it is here;... ............ In the country of the lotus of the head Which thinking mind has made its busy space, In the castle of the lotus twixt the brows Whence it shoots the arrows of its sight and will, In the passage of the lotus of the throat Where speech must rise and the expressing mind And the heart's impulse run towards word and fact, A glad uplift and ...
... and perversion of the nature, a mind blinded and pulled down towards inconscience and ignorance, hardly arriving at knowledge, an intellect prone to interpret the higher knowledge in abstractions and indirect figures seizing and holding even the messages of the higher intuition with an uncertain and disputed grasp, there could emerge Page 565 a true mind liberated and capable of the free... about a deeper communion between the universal and the individual, invade the ideal with the spiritual truth of which it is a luminous shadow and help to uplift into or towards a greater and higher existence. Mind it will uplift towards a diviner light of thought and will, life towards deeper and truer emotion and action, towards a larger power of itself, towards high aims and motives. Whatever cannot... and establish it here. Supermind is the grade of existence beyond mind, life and Matter and, as mind, life and Matter have manifested on the earth, so too must Supermind in the inevitable course of things manifest in this world of Matter. In fact, a supermind is already here but it is involved, concealed behind this manifest mind, life and Matter and not yet acting overtly or in its own power: if ...
... the mind. What Sri Aurobindo means is: Unless one has gone beyond the mind and into altogether higher regions, so long as one remains in the human consciousness, the mental, vital, physical consciousness, one must concentrate in order to find the psychic. It is only if you have soared up out of the human consciousness and entered consciously the higher regions above the mind, far above the mind, that... psychic because you will naturally find it. But to rise above the mental consciousness, not into a higher speculative mind, but far beyond all mental movements is not an easy thing. To begin with, the mind must be absolutely silent and quiet, otherwise one can't do it. It is only when the mind enters into a complete silence, a perfect quietude, that it becomes just a mirror for reflecting what is... their being open to compassion. At times it was ridiculously small, but it was there. Sweet Mother, when you say, "Concentrate in the heart", does it mean concentrate with the mind? The consciousness, not the mind, the consciousness! Page 249 I don't say think in the heart, I say concentrate, concentrate the energy, concentrate the consciousness, concentrate the aspiration, concentrate ...
... falsehood and perversion of the nature, a mind blinded and pulled down towards inconscience and ignorance, hardly arriving at knowledge, an intellect prone to interpret the higher knowledge in abstractions and indirect figures seizing and holding even the messages of the higher intuition with an uncertain and disputed grasp, there could emerge a true mind liberated and capable of the free and utmost... about a deeper communion between the universal and the individual, invade the ideal with the spiritual truth of which it is a luminous shadow and help to uplift into or towards a greater and higher existence. Mind it will uplift towards a diviner light of thought and will, life towards deeper and truer emotion and action, towards a larger power of itself, towards high aims and motives. Whatever cannot... establish it here. Supermind is the grade of existence beyond mind, life and Matter and, as mind, life and Matter have manifested on the earth, so too must Supermind in the inevitable course of things manifest in this world of Matter. In fact, a supermind is already here but it is involved, concealed behind. this manifest mind, life and Matter and not yet acting overtly or in its own power: if ...
... fluid, helped by a greater force of thought and imagination. This turn sometimes rises to a higher level of inspired and imaginative poetic eloquence. But beyond this pitch we have a fuller and richer style packed with thought and imaginative substance, the substitute of this new intellectualised poetic mind for the more spontaneous Elizabethan richness and curiosity; but imaginative thought is the... secondary kind he did, but he had something greater to say which he never said, but only gave rare hints of it and an obscured sense of the presence of its meaning. Wordsworth, with a much higher poetic mind than Byron's, did not so entirely miss his greatest way, though he wandered much in adjacent paths and finally lost himself in the dry desert sands of the uninspired intellectual mentality. At... shallow and hurried, a poet by compulsion of personality rather than in the native colour of his mind, inferior in all these respects to the finer strain of his great contemporaries, but in compensation a more powerful elemental force than any of them and more in touch with all that had begun to stir in the mind of the times,—always an advantage, if one knows how to make use of it, for a poet's largeness ...
... the dark prison of Matter, to enlighten its blind instincts, random intuitions, vague perceptions till it shall become capable of this greater light and this higher ascension. Mind is a passage, not a culmination. On the other hand, the unitarian consciousness or indivisible Unity cannot be that impossible entity, a thing without contents out of which all contents have issued and into which they... Will to light and vision, but a Will to power and works. And since Mind too is created out of it, Mind must be a development by limitation out of this primal faculty and this mediatory act of the supreme Consciousness and must therefore be capable of resolving itself back into it through a reverse development by expansion. For always Mind must be identical with Supermind in essence and conceal in itself... 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 Mind is to train our obscure consciousness which has emerged out of the ...
... Ineffable. But this is a view of the meaning of existence against which it is time for the higher seeing mind and being of man to protest and to ask whether the ways of the Spirit in the world may not be capable of a greater, nobler and wiser significance. But still, since the mind of man is part of the universal mind and reflects something of it in a however broken or as yet imperfect and crookedly seeing... lives, but my perfection and the higher good of mankind purchased by whatever suffering and tribulation. Spinoza's dictum that joy is a passage to a greater perfection and sorrow a passage to a lesser perfection is a much too summary epigram. Delight will be indeed the atmosphere of perfection and attends too even the anguish of our labour towards it, but first a higher delight which has often much trouble... superior planes of the universal existence, but they are still a part of the economy of Karma here, a process of the spiritual evolution in the body. And they bring in a higher soul nature and will and action and consequence, a higher rule of Karma. The law of Karma is therefore not simply an extension of the human idea of practical justice into future births and Page 374 a rectification ...
... interaction comprehend the warp and woof of its action upon itself. And to a consciousness higher than Mind which should regard our past, present and future in one view, containing and not contained in them, not situated at a particular moment of Time for its point of prospection, Time might well offer itself as an eternal present. And to the same consciousness not situated at any particular point of Space... analytical, dividing movement of Mind. Time is for the Mind a mobile extension measured out by the succession of the past, present and future in which Mind places itself at a certain standpoint whence it looks before Page 142 and after. Space is a stable extension measured out by divisibility of substance; at a certain point in that divisible extension Mind places itself and regards the ... the mind's possibilities and very many more not visible to the mind, but without any error, groping or confusion; for it perceives each potentiality in its proper force, essential necessity, right relation to the others and the time, place and circumstance both of its gradual and its Page 144 ultimate realisation. To see things steadily and see them whole is not possible to the mind; but ...
... include here in mind, not only the highest range of mind ordinarily known to man, but yet higher ranges to which he has either no current faculty of admission or else only a partial and mixed reception of some faint portion of their powers,—the illumined mind, the intuition and finally the creative Overmind or Maya which stands far above and is the source of our present existence. If mind is to be understood... impossible; the soul that attains only so far would have to return to the physical life for a greater experience, a higher self-development, a more direct ascent to the Spirit. Above matter and life stands the principle of mind, nearer to the secret Origin of things. The Spirit poised in mind becomes the mental self of a mental world and dwells there in the reign of its own pure and luminous mental Nature... supported by the combined workings of a psycho-mental and a higher emotional mind-force, subtilised and enlightened by the clarity and happiness of the sattwic principle proper to the mental existence. In the individual the spirit so poised becomes a mental soul, manomaya puruṣa , in whose nature the clarity and luminous power of the mind acts in its own right independent of any limitation or oppression ...
... between the lower or outward mind still subservient to the old habitual touches and the higher reason and Page 712 will which stand back to live in the indifferent calm of the spirit. There grows on us, in other words, an inner separate calm which watches the commotion of the lower members without taking part in it or giving it any sanction. At first the higher reason and will may be often... lover, rejoicing in him and in our relation with him and having no other object or cause of joy or sorrow. Here too there may be for some time a division between the lower mind of habitual emotions and the higher psychical mind of love and self-giving, but eventually the former yields, changes, transforms itself, is swallowed up in the love, joy, delight of the Divine and has no other interests or... striving for possession, can be divided, the higher spiritual disengaged from the lower mental nature. But in this stage, while the mind is still subject to reactions of grief, trouble, an inferior joy and pleasure, there is an increased difficulty which does not act to the same extent in a more sharply individualised Yoga. For not only does the mind feel its own troubles and difficulties, but it ...
... conscious in its operations in the human mind that develops itself in one fundamental way and yet variously in language. It is this Force, this Shakti to which the old Vedic thinkers gave the name of Vak, the goddess of creative Speech, and the Tantric psychists supposed that this Power acts in us through different subtle nervous centres on higher and higher levels of its force and that thus the word... natural body of intuitive intensity, because it too will take up the thought and feeling into a concentrated expression of an equal though a different directness. It will be the language of a higher intuitive mind swallowing up the intellectual tones into the closenesses and identities of a supra-intellectual light and Ananda. The future poetry, assuming it to be of the kind I have suggested, its object... it which admits analysis; the creative faculty of the poetic mind is no exception. The poet is a magician who hardly knows the secret Page 288 of his own spell; even the part taken by the consciously critical or constructive mind is less intellectual than intuitive; he creates by an afflatus of spiritual power of which his mind is the channel and instrument and the appreciation of it in ...
... questions the mind can ask. One way of solving them is for the mind to make an ascent to the Higher Consciousness and learn the truth. In fact mind is derivative from Supermind. You can see that the process of creation, from being to becoming, from the One to the Many, from the absolute, to the relative, or, from the Truth-Consciousness to the world as we know it, includes the creation of mind, life, and... the idea to the mind because of the rarety of the Page 144 experience and also the difficulty of communication. Human language and mind being limited instruments of expression of the soul, do not lend themselves easily to an expression of this truth, which is so baffing to the mind. That is why, those who speak about it resort to symbols when they express the higher Reality. It is not... Brahman. Space is not empty, it is filled with the silence of the Infinite. "Mind measures time by event and space by matter." Time and Space are only two aspects of the universal force of consciousness. To a consciousness higher than mind time would be eternal Present and so it can know the world quite in another way than the mind. Eternity of time can be compressed into a moment, it can be expanded to ...
... Cross for the manifestation of the Higher Part of the Transcendent both sideways and downwards in the universal consciousness around and below. This is possible only when the separate formation of the individual personality is dissolved and the separate limited functioning of the instruments is made silent. The organs in man—his senses, vital being, heart, mind and the inner being—are so many... Spirit but fields for the manifestation of endless powers of the higher consciousness. Mind was a single innumerable look Upon himself and all that he became, Life was his drama and the Vast a stage, The universe was his body, God its soul. Page 92 All phenomenon are the self-deployings of the one Noumenon. All was one single immense reality, All its... again and again if it is to be filled with ever-new riches. The vessel of the human consciousness has to be kept free and ready for the advent of the felicities of the higher altitudes of being. For what prevents the inflow of the Higher Consciousness into the Lower is precisely the spirit of holding, grabbing and egoistic appropriation. Such a spirit not only insulates the gifts of Grace and therefore ...
... the powers of the mind, and he develops various forms of culture, which manifest the triangular powers of the Mind, namely the powers of the rationalistic mind, ethical mind and aesthetic mind. But this is not all. He also tries to control and integrate these powers of the mind; in doing so, man, the mental being, begins to exceed himself, and bring out in different degrees higher powers of consciousness... and a new range of subtle activities; whereas in the higher animal, mind is limited to the vital existence, the human mentality rises up to reflecting and thinking mind; there is developed a higher power of conservation and invention; there is consciousness of process and result; there is also a force of imagination and aesthetic creation, a higher more plastic sensibility; and, finally, there develops... is already involved in Matter and Mind in Life because in essence Matter is a form of veiled Life, Life a form of veiled Consciousness. And then there seems to be little objection to a farther step in the series and the admission that mental consciousness may itself be only a form and a veil of higher states which are beyond Mind. .. .As the impulse towards Mind ranges from the more sensitive reactions ...
... radical step is to turn away from all that belongs to your lower Nature Page 581 and fix yourself by concentration of the will and intelligence on that which is higher than either will or intelligence, higher than mind and heart and sense and body. And first of all you must turn to your own eternal and immutable self, impersonal and the same in all creatures. So long as you live in ego and... he lives in one or the other, he will be a mind dwelling in human ignorance or a soul founded in divine knowledge. In its outer appearance the truth of existence is solely what we call Nature or Prakriti, a Force that operates as the whole law and mechanism of being, creates the world which is the object of our mind and senses and creates too the mind and senses as a means of relation between the... outer appearance man in his soul, his mind, his life, his body seems to be a creature of Nature differentiated from others by a separation of his body, life and mind and especially by his ego-sense—that subtle mechanism constructed for him that he may confirm and centralise his consciousness of all this strong separateness and difference. All in him, his soul of mind and its action as well as the functioning ...
... could at once have detected an action of the illumined spiritual Mind taking up the vital love and soaring into spiritual greatness. Or take the quotation— Page 391 the prophetic soul Of the wide world dreaming on things to come. Here both style and language come ultimately from a higher above-mind level, but still it is quite different from Wordsworth's line... the difference comes because the vision of the "dreaming soul" is felt through the vital mind and heart before it finds expression; in the lines of Wordsworth the vision of the lone voyager through strange seas of thought has not that peculiar thrill but rather remains in an exaltation of light between the mind and some vastness above it. It is this constant vitality, this magnificent vital surge in... in Shakespeare's language which makes it a sovereign expression, but of life and, so far as it is also a voice of mind or knowledge, not of pure intellectual thought but of life-mind and of life-knowledge. 27 February 1935 Our revels now are ended. These our actors, As I foretold you, were all spirits, and Are melted into air, into thin air: And, like the baseless fabric of this vision, ...
... small physical vital which takes only an interest in the small and trivial things of the ordinary daily and social life and nothing else. When formerly the sadhana was going on on the higher levels (mind, higher vital, etc.), there was plenty of vigour and verve and interest in the details of the Ashram work and life as well as in an inner life; this physical vital was carried in the stream. But... others are a play of the mind or vital and are good only for their own special purpose, others are formations of the mind and vital plane some of which may have truth, while others are false and misleading, or they may be a sort of artistry of that plane. They can have considerable importance in the development of the first Yogic consciousness, that of the inner mind, inner vital, inner physical... especially an acceptance of bhakti as your path and of the implications of that acceptance. The mind has taken a new poise less intellectual and more psychic. What prevents you from seeing the growth of bhakti (sometimes you have seen it and written about it) is a continuance of the physical mind which sets going with a constant repetitionary whirl of its fixed ideas whenever there is any touch ...
... necessity, the original radical step is to turn away from all that belongs to your lower Nature and fix yourself by concentration of the will and intelligence on that which is higher than either will or intelligence, higher than mind and heart and sense and body. And first of all you must turn to your own eternal and immutable self, impersonal and the same in all creatures. So long as you live in ego and... Time, and the Gita would have us live in the Eternal. Or if these higher things are now beginning to be vaguely envisaged, it is only to make them subservient to man and society; but God and spirituality exist in their own right and not as adjuncts. And in practice the lower in us must learn to exist for the higher, in order that the higher also may in us consciously exist for the lower, to draw it nearer... status and entirely dependent on the thought and conscience. The Gita does not teach us to subordinate the higher plane to the lower, it does not ask the awakened moral consciousness to slay itself on the altar of duty as a sacrifice and victim to the law of the social status. It calls us higher and not lower; from the conflict of the two planes it bids us ascend to a supreme poise above the mainly practical ...
... could so master the laws of mind as to entirely control our vital & physical being & its environment, the end of God in man is not achieved; for we ought not only to control life & matter by mind, but mind by a higher principle. Mind can only become free by self-subjection to God above mind and without freedom there is no true mastery. Samrajya is unreal without Swarajya. Mind that has mastered its inferior... is established, a new & higher or subtler rhythm effected. But the upward evolutionary movement has only begun with the appearance of life; it is not ended. The Truth of things, the pure Idea at work in matter knows that Mind also is involved in Matter & the Truth of things demands & compels its evolution. It procures, again perhaps by the pull from a higher world where mind is the predominant power... from a higher world where the Idea would be the dominant power & basic principle, its own release out of the limitations of sensational mentality. Just as we found matter to be a formation out of life-energy, & life-energy to be a formation out of mind, so mind is a formation out of vijnana. That which has constituted & governs stone or tree, animal or man, is not matter, nor life, nor mind, but the ...
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