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SECTION THREE
INTELLECTUAL KNOWLEDGE AND SPIRITUAL TRUTH
Intellect, Mind and Truth
INTELLECT is part of Mind and an instrument of half-truth like the rest of the Mind.
22-8-1932
WHAT you have said is perfectly right. To see the Truth does not depend on a big intellect or a small intellect. It depends on being in contact with the Truth and the mind silent and quiet to receive it. The biggest intellects can make errors of the worst kind and confuse Truth and Falsehood, if they have not the contact with the Truth or the direct experience.
1-8-1932 Page-79 Need of Controlling the Intellect
THE point is that people take no trouble to see whether their intellect is giving them right thoughts, right conclusions, right views on things and persons, right indications about their conduct or course of action. They have their idea and accept it as truth or follow it simply because it is their idea. Even when they recognise that they have made mistakes of the mind, they do not consider it of any importance nor do they try to be more careful mentally than before. In the vital field people know that they must not follow their desires or impulses without check or control, they know that they ought to have a conscience or a moral sense which discriminates what they can or should do and what they cannot or should not do; in the field of intellect no such care is taken. Men are supposed to follow their intellect, to have and assert their own ideas right or wrong without any control; the intellect, it is said, is man's highest instrument and he must think and act according to its ideas. But this is not true; the intellect needs an inner light to guide, check and control it quite as much as the vital. There is something above the intellect which one has to discover and the intellect should be only an intermediary for the action of that source of true Knowledge.
23-3-1937 Page-80
IN the sphere of the Spirit are only the eternal truths—all is eternally itself there, there is no development, nothing unrealised or striving to be fulfilled. There are no such things as possibilities therefore. In life, on the other hand, all is a play of possibilities —nothing is realised, all is seeking to be realised—or if not yet seeking, then waiting behind the veil for that. Nothing is realised in its highest form, in its truth or completeness, but all is possible. All these possibilities are derived from the truths above, e.g., the possibility of knowledge, the possibility of love, the possibility of joy, etc. Intellect, will, etc. are intermediaries which try to catch something of the hidden higher truths and bring them into life or else raise life to them so that the possibilities of life here may become the complete realities that are already there above.
16-3-1936 Page-81 The Supreme Knowledge and the Lower Ignorance
THE mind in its higher part is aware of being one with the Divine, in all ways, in all things—having that supreme knowledge, it is not disturbed by its own ignorance and impotence in its lower instrumental parts; it looks on all that with a smile and remains happy and luminous with the light of the supreme knowledge. The consciousness of union with the Divine is for the spiritual seeker the supreme knowledge.
MENTAL knowledge is of little use except sometimes as an introduction pointing towards the real knowledge which comes from direct consciousness of things.
25-6-1936
Greater Perfection in Knowledge
IT (greater perfection in knowledge) can come only by further development and the activity of another kind of knowledge communicating itself to the physical and taking up gradually the functions of the mind in all its parts.
13-5-1936 Page-82 Spiritual Knowledge and Worldly Ignorance
IT does not help for spiritual knowledge to be ignorant of things of this world.
Mental Knowledge and Psychic Perception
IT is not a mental knowledge that is necessary but a psychic perception or a direct perception in the consciousness. A mental knowledge can always be blinded by the tricks of the vital.
26-6-1936 Page-83 Mental Perception, Mental Realisation and Spiritual Experience
You have to know by experience. The mental perception and mental realisation are different from each other—the first is only an idea, in the second the mind in its very substance reflects or reproduces the truth. The spiritual experience is more than the mental—it is in the very substance of the being that the experience takes place.
11-6-1933
MENTAL realisation is useful at the beginning and prepares spiritual experience. It can help too at the beginning—but also it can hinder. It depends on the sadhaka.
Touch of Realisation and Higher Knowledge
YES, it happens like that. A touch of realisation is enough to set the higher mind knowledge or the illumined mind knowledge flowing.
25-5-1936. Page-84 Half-light of Idea and Complete Truth
THE idea is not enough. It gives only a half-light —you must get to all the Truth that lies behind the idea and the object together. Being, consciousness, force—that is the triple secret.
19-3-1933
THERE is a power in the idea—a force of which the idea is a shape. Again, behind the idea and force and word there is what is called the spirit,—a consciousness which generates the force.
Knowledge and Divine Consciousness
ALL consciousness comes from the one Consciousness —Knowledge is one aspect of the Divine Consciousness.
21-8-1933 Page-85 Mind, Vital and the One Consciousness
MIND and vital are two different processes of one consciousness.
24-4-1935
The Intellectual and the Emotional Man
IF the intellectual will always have a greater wideness and vastness, how can we be sure that he will have an equal fervour, depth and sweetness with the emotional man? It may be that homo intellectualis will remain wider and homo psychicus will remain deeper in heart (even when the latter's inner mind opens up). Do not confuse the higher knowledge and the mental knowledge. The intellectual man will be able to give a more wide and more orderly expression to what higher knowledge he gets than the homo psychicus; but it does not follow he will have more of it. He will have that only if he rises to an equal width and plasticity and comprehensiveness of the higher knowledge planes. In that case he will replace his mental by his above-mental capacity. But for many intellectuals, Page-86 so called, their intellectuality may be a stumbling block as they bind themselves with mental conceptions or stifle their psychic fire under the heavy weight of rational thought. On the other hand, I have seen comparatively uneducated people expressing higher knowledge with an astonishing fullness and depth and accuracy which the stumbling movements of their brain could never have allowed one to suppose possible. Therefore, why fix beforehand by the mind what will or will not be possible when the above-mind reigns? What the mind conceives as "must be" need not be the measure of the "will be". Such and such homo intellectualis may turn out to be a more fervent God-lover than the effervescent emotional man; such and such an emotionalist may receive and express a wider knowledge than his intellect or even the intellect of the intellectual man could have harboured or organised. Let us not bind the phenomena of the higher consciousness by the possibilities and probabilities of a lower plane. Page-87
As to doubts and argumentative answers to them, I have long given up the practice as I found it perfectly useless. Yoga is not a field for intellectual argument or dissertation. It is not by the exercise of the logical or the debating mind that one can arrive at a true understanding of Yoga or follow it. A doubting spirit, "honest doubt" and the claim that the intellect shall be satisfied and be made the judge on every point is all very well in the field of mental action outside. But Yoga is not a mental field, the consciousness which has to be established is not a mental, logical or debating consciousness—it is even laid down by Yoga that unless and until the mind is stilled, including the intellectual or logical mind, and opens itself in quietude or silence to a higher and deeper consciousness, vision and knowledge, sadhana cannot reach its goal. For the same reason an unquestioning openness to the Guru is demanded in the Indian spiritual tradition; as for blame, criticism and attack on the Guru, it was considered reprehensible and the surest possible obstacle to sadhana. If the spirit of doubt could be overcome by meeting it with arguments, there might be something in the demand for its removal by satisfaction through logic. But the spirit of doubt doubts for its own sake, for the sake of doubt; it simply uses the mind as its instrument for its particular dharma, Page-88 and this not the least when that mind thinks it is seeking sincerely for a solution of its honest and irrepressible doubts. Mental positions always differ, moreover, and it is well-known that people can argue for ever without one convincing the other. To go on perpetually answering persistent and always recurring doubts such as for long have filled this Ashram and obstructed the sadhana, is merely to frustrate the aim of the Yoga and go against its central principle with no spiritual or other gain whatever. If anybody gets over his fundamental doubts, it is by the growth of the psychic in him or by an enlargement of his consciousness, not otherwise. Questions which arise from the spirit of enquiry, not aggressive or self-assertive, but as a part of a hunger for knowledge can be answered, but the "spirit of doubt" is insatiable and unappeasable.
Value of Mental Questions in Yoga
OUT of one thousand mental questions and answers there are only one or two here and there that are really of any dynamic assistance—while a single inner response or a little growth of consciousness will Page-89 do what those thousand questions and answers could not do. The Yoga does not proceed by upadesh but by inner influence. To state your condition, experiences, etc. and open to the help is far more important than question-asking.
4-6-1936
Mental Understanding and Inner Help
WHAT I write usually helps only the mind and that too very little, for people do not really understand what I write—they put their own constructions on it. The inner help is quite different and there can be no confusion with it, for it reaches the substance of the consciousness, not the mind only.
Right Way of Understanding the Workings of Consciousness
IN the things of the subtle kind having to do with the working of consciousness in the sadhana, one has to learn to feel and observe and see with the Page-90 inner consciousness and to decide by the intuition with a plastic look on things which does not make set definitions and rules as one has to do in outward life.
7-4-1936
Mental Constructions and the Truth
PEOPLE do not understand what I write because the mind by itself cannot understand things that are beyond it. It constructs its own idea out of something that it catches or that it has caught and puts that idea as the whole meaning of what has been written. Each mind puts its own ideas in place of the Truth.
6-6-1936 Page-91 Action by Higher Force in the Still Mind
WHEN the personal mind is still, whatever mental action is needed is taken up and done by the Force itself which does all the necessary thinking and progressively transforms it by bringing down into it a higher and higher plane of perception and knowledge.
18-12-1936
(1)
WHAT you describe is not at all a drawing away of life-energy; it is simply the effect of voidness and stillness caused in the lower parts by the consciousness being located above. It is quite consistent with action, only one must get accustomed to the idea of the possibility of action under these conditions. In a greater state of emptiness I carried on a daily newspaper and made a dozen speeches in the course of three or four days—but I did not manage that in any way; it happened. The force made the body do the work without any inner activity. The drawing away of the life-energy leaves the body lifeless, helpless, empty and impotent, but it is attended by no experience except a great suffering.
13-5-1936 Page-92 (2)
Not necessary at all. It is perfectly possible to do work in an entire emptiness without any interference or activity of the lower parts of the consciousness.
16-5-1936
IT is in the silence of the mind that the strongest and freest action can come, e.g., the writing of a book, poetry, inspired speech, etc. When the mind is active it interferes with the inspiration, puts in its own small ideas which get mixed up with the inspiration or starts something from a lower level or simply stops the inspiration altogether by bubbling up with all sorts of mere mental suggestions. So also intuitions or action, etc. can come more easily when the ordinary inferior movement of the mind is not there. It is also in the silence of the mind that it is easiest for knowledge to come from within or above, from the psychic or from the higher consciousness.
9-9-1936 Page-93 Observations on Prof. Sorley's Comments on Spiritual Experience and Intellectual Judgment
I FIND nothing to object to in Prof. Sorley's comment on the still, bright and clear mind, for it adequately indicates the process by which the mind makes itself ready for the reflection of the higher Truth in its undisturbed surface or substance. One thing perhaps needs to be kept in view—this pure stillness of the mind is always the required condition, the desideratum, but to bring it about there are more ways than one. It is not, for instance, only by an effort of the mind itself to get clear of all intrusive emotion or passion or of its own characteristic vibrations or of the obscuring fumes of a physical inertia which brings about the sleep or torpor of the mind instead of its wakeful silence that the thing can be done—for this is only the ordinary process of the Yogic path of knowledge. It can happen also by a descent from above of a great spiritual stillness imposing silence on the mind and heart and the life stimuli and the physical reflexes. A sudden descent of this kind or a series of descents accumulative in force and efficacy is a well-known phenomenon Page-94 of spiritual experience. Or again one may start process of one kind or another for the purpose which would normally mean a long labour and be seized, even at the outset, by a rapid intervention or manifestation of the Silence with an effect out of all proportion to the means used at the beginning. One commences with a method, but the work is taken up by a Grace from above, from That to which one aspires or an irruption of the infinitudes of the Spirit. It was in this last way that I myself came by the mind's absolute silence, unimaginable to me before I had its actual experience. There is another point of some importance— the exact nature of this brightness, clearness, stillness, —of what it is constituted, whether it is merely a psychological condition or something more. Professor Sorley says these words are after all metaphors and he wants to express and succeeds in expressing the same thing in a more abstract language. But I was not conscious of using metaphors when I wrote the phrase, though I am aware that the words could to others have that appearance. I think even that they would seem to one who had half the same experience not only a more vivid but a more accurate description of this inner state than any more abstract language could give. It is true that metaphors, symbols, images are constant auxiliaries Page-95 summoned by the mystic for the expression of his experiences: that is inevitable because he has to express, in a language made or at least developed and manipulated by the mind, the phenomena of a consciousness other than the mental and at once more complex and more subtly concrete. It is this subtle concrete, supersensuously sensible reality of the phenomena of that consciousness to which the mystic arrives, that justifies the use of metaphor and image as a more living and accurate transcription than the abstract terms which intellectual reflection employs for its own characteristic process. If the images used are misleading or not descriptively accurate, it is because the writer has a force of expression inadequate to the intensity of his experience. The scientist speaks of light-waves or of sound-waves and in doing so he uses a metaphor, but one which corresponds to the physical fact and is perfectly applicable—for there is no reason why there should not be a wave, a constant flowing movement of light or of sound as well as of water. But when I speak of the mind's brightness, clearness, stillness, I have no idea of calling metaphor to my aid. It was meant to be a description as precise and positive as if I were describing in the same way an expanse of air or a sheet of water. For the mystic's experience of mind—especially when it Page-96 falls still is not that of an abstract condition or a falling off or of some unseizable element of the consciousness, it is an experience of an extended subtle substance in which there can be and are waves, currents, vibrations not material but still as definite, perceptible, controllable by an inner sense as any movement of material energy or substance by the physical senses. The stillness of the mind means first the falling to rest of the habitual thought movements, thought formations, thought currents which agitate the mind-substance, and that for many is a sufficient mental silence. But even in this repose of all thought movements or movements of feelings, when one looks more closely at it, one sees that this mind-substance is in a constant state of very subtle vibration, not at first easily observable, but afterwards quite evident —and that state of constant vibration may be as harmful to the exact reflection or reception of the descending Truth as any more formed thought movement—for it is the source of a mentalisation which can diminish or distort the authenticity of the higher Truth or break it up into mental refractions. When I speak of a still mind, I mean one in which these disturbances are no longer there. As they fall quiet one can feel the increasing stillness and a resultant clearness as palpable as one can Page-97 perceive the stillness and clearness of a physical atmosphere. What I describe as the brightness-- there is another element—is resolved into a phenomenon of Light common in mystic experience. That Light is not a metaphor—as when Goethe called for more light in his last moments—it presents itself as a very positive illumination actually seen and felt by the inner sense. The brightness of the still and clear mind is also a positive reflection of this Light before the Light itself manifests—and this reflection of the Light is a very necessary condition for a growing capacity of penetrability by the Truth one has to receive and harbour. I have emphasised this part of the subject at a little length because it helps to bring out the difference between the abstract mental and the concrete mystic perception of supraphysical things which is the source of much misunderstanding between the spiritual seeker and the intellectual thinker. Even when they speak the same language it is a different order of perceptions to which the language refers the products of two different grades of consciousness and even in their agreement there is often a certain gulf of difference. Page-98 (2)
That brings us straight to the question raised by Professor Sorley, what is the relation of mystic or spiritual experience and is it true, as it is contended, that the mystic must, whether as to the validity of his experience itself or the validity of his expression of it, accept the intellect as the judge. It is very plain that in the experience itself the intellect cannot claim to put its limits or its law on an endeavour whose very aim, principle and matter is to go beyond the domain of the ordinary earth-ruled and sense-ruled mental intelligence. It is as if I were asked to climb a mountain with a rope around my feet attaching me to the terrestrial level or to fly only on condition that I keep my feet on the earth while I do it. It may be the safest thing to walk on earth and be on firm ground always and to ascend on wings or otherwise may be to risk a collapse and all sorts of accidents of error, illusion, extravagance, hallucination or what not—the usual charges of the positive earth-walking intellect against mystic experience; but I have to take the risk if I want to do it at all. The reasoning intellect bases itself on man's normal experience and on the workings of a surface external perception and conception of things which is at its ease only when Page-99 working on a mental basis formed by terrestrial experience and its accumulated data. The mystic goes beyond into a region where this mental basis falls away, where these data are exceeded, where there is another law and canon of perception and knowledge. His entire business is to break through these borders into another consciousness which looks at things in a different way and though this new consciousness may include the data of the ordinary external intelligence it cannot be limited by them or bind itself to see from the intellectual standpoint or in accordance with its way of conceiving, reasoning, established interpretation of experience. A mystic entering the domain of the occult or of the spirit with the intellect as his only or his supreme light or guide would risk seeing nothing or else arriving only at a mental realisation already laid down for him by the speculations of the intellectual thinker. There is, no doubt, a strain of spiritual thought in India which compromises with the modern intellectual demand and admits Reason as a supreme judge, but they speak of a Reason which in its turn is prepared to compromise and accept the data of spiritual experience as valid per se. That, in a sense, is just what the Indian philosophers have always done; for they have tried to establish Page-100 generalisations drawn from spiritual experience by the light of metaphysical reasoning, but on the basis of that experience and with the evidence of the spiritual seekers as a supreme proof ranking higher than intellectual speculation or experience. In that way the freedom of spiritual and mystic experience is preserved, the reasoning intellect comes in only on the second line as a judge of the generalised statements drawn from the experience. This is, I presume, something akin to Prof. Sorley's position—he concedes that the experience itself is of the domain of the Ineffable, but as soon as I begin to interpret it, to state it, I fall back into the domain of the thinking mind, I use its terms and ways of thought and expression and must accept the intellect as judge. If I do not, I knock away the ladder by which I have climbed—through mind to Beyond-Mind—and I am left in the air. It is not quite clear whether the truth of my experience itself is supposed to be invalidated by this unsustained position in the air, but it remains at any rate something aloof and incommunicable without support or any consequences for thought or life. There are three propositions, I suppose, which I can take as laid down or admitted here and joined together. First, the spiritual experience is itself of the Beyond-Mind, ineffable and, I presume, unthinkable. Next, in the Page-101 expression, the interpretation of the experience, you are obliged to fall back into the domain of the consciousness you have left and must abide by its judgments, accept the terms and the canons of its law, submit to its verdict; you have abandoned the freedom of the Ineffable and are no longer your master. Last, spiritual truth may be true in itself, to its own self-experience, but any statement of it is liable to error and here the intellect is the sole judge. I do not think I am prepared to accept any of these affirmations completely as they are. It is true that spiritual and mystic experience carries one first into domains of Other-Mind (and also Other-Life) and then into the Beyond-Mind; it is true also that the ultimate Truth is described as unthinkable, ineffable, unknowable—speech cannot reach there nor mind arrive to it; I may observe that it is so to human mind, but not to itself—for to itself it is described as self-conscient, in some direct supramental way knowable, known, eternally self-aware. And here the question is not of the ultimate realisation of the ultimate Ineffable which, according to many, can only be reached in a supreme trance, samādhi, withdrawn from all outer mental or other awareness, but of an experience in a luminous silence of the mind which looks up into the boundlessness of the last illimitable silence into which it is to pass and disappear, Page-102 but before that unspeakable experience of the Ultimate or disappearance into it, there is possible a descent of at least some Power or Presence of the Reality into the substance of mind along with a modification of mind-substance, an illumination of it, and of this experience an expression of some kind, a rendering into thought ought to be possible. Or let us suppose the Ineffable and Unknowable may have aspects, presentations of it that are not utterly unthinkable and ineffable. If it were not so, all account of spiritual truth and experience would be impossible. At most one could speculate about it, but that would be an activity very much in the air, even in a void, without support or data, a mere manipulation of all the possible ideas of what might be the Supreme and Ultimate. Apart from that there could be only a certain unaccountable transition by one way or another from consciousness to an incommunicable Supra- conscience. That is indeed what much mystical seeking actually reached both in Europe and India. The Christian mystics spoke of a total darkness, a darkness complete and untouched by any mental lights, through which one must pass into that luminous Ineffable. The Indian Sannyasis sought to shed mind altogether and pass into a thought-free trance from which if one returns, no communication or Page-103 expression could be brought back of what was there except a remembrance of inexpressible existence and bliss. But still there were previous experiences of the supreme mystery, formulations of the Highest or the occult universal Existence which were held to be spiritual truth and on the basis of which the seers and mystics did not hesitate to formulate their experience and the thinkers to build on it numberless philosophies and books of exegesis. The only question that remains is what creates the possibility of this communication and expression, this transmission of the facts of a different order of consciousness to the mind and what determines the validity of the expression or, even, of the original experience. If no valid account were possible there could be no question of the judgment of the intellect—only the grotesque contradiction of sitting down to speak of the Ineffable, think of the Unthinkable, comprehend the Incommunicable and Unknowable. Page-104 |