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SECTION TEN
INNER SIGHT AND INNER VISION
Opening of the Inner Sight
WHEN one tries to meditate, the first obstacle in the beginning is sleep. When you get over this obstacle, there comes a condition in which, with the eyes closed, you begin to see things, people, scenes of all kinds. This is not a bad thing, it is a good sign and means that you are making progress in the Yoga. There is, besides the outer physical sight which sees external objects, an inner sight in us which can see things yet unseen and unknown, things at a distance, things belonging to another place or time or to other worlds; it is the inner sight which is opening in you. It is the working of the Mother's force which is opening it in you, and you should not try to stop it. Remember the Mother always, call on her and aspire to feel her presence and her power working in you; but you do not need, for that, to reject this or other developments that may come in you by her working hereafter. It is only desire, egoism, restlessness and other wrong movements that have to be rejected.
11-4-1932 Page-257 Inner Vision and Mental Vision
INNER vision is vivid like actual sight, always precise and contains a truth in it. In mental vision the images are invented by the mind and are partly true, partly a play of possibilities. Or a mental vision like the vital may be only a suggestion,— that is a formation of some possibility on the mental or vital plane which presents itself to the sadhak in the hope of being accepted and helped to realise itself.
20-7-1934 Inner Vision and Vibration of Forces
THE inner vision can see objects, but it can see instead the vibration of the forces which act through the object.
11-6-1933
THE mental visions are meant to bring in the mind the influence of the things they represent.
19-7-1934 Page-258 Cosmic Vision, Inner Vision and Psychic Vision
COSMIC vision is the seeing of the universal movements —it has nothing to do with the psychic necessarily. It can be in the universal mind, the universal vital, the universal physical or anywhere. What do you mean here by psychic vision? Inner vision means the vision with the inner seeing as opposed to outer vision, the external sight with the surface mind in the surface eyes. Psychic, in the language of this Yoga, is confined to the soul, the psychic being—it is not as in the ordinary language in which if you see a ghost it is called a "psychic vision"; we speak of the inner vision or the subtle sight—not the psychic vision.
22-3-1933 Power of Inner Vision—Presence and Contact
WHAT was developed in you is a power of true inner vision—this will help you to enter through it into touch with the Divine; you have only to let it develop. Two other things have to develop— the feeling of the Divine Presence and power and Page-259 inspiration behind your actions, and the inner contact with myself and the Mother. Aspire with faith and sincerity and these will come. I do not wish to give any more precise instructions until I see what happens in you during your stay here; for although the path is common to all, each man has his own way of following it.
16-7-1934
NOTHING has to be done to develop the images seen in the vision. They develop of themselves by the growing practice of seeing,—what was faint becomes clear, what was incomplete becomes complete. One cannot say in a general way that they are real or unreal. Some are formations of the mind, some are images that come to the sight of themselves, some are images of real things that show themselves directly to the sights—others are true pictures, not merely images.
11-8-1934 Page-260
1. THE vision was seen through the physical eyes but by the subtle physical consciousness; in other words, there was an imposition of one consciousness upon another. After a certain stage of development, this capacity of living in the ordinary physical consciousness and yet having superadded to it another and more subtle sense, vision, experience becomes quite normal. A little concentration is enough to bring it; or, even, it happens automatically without any concentration. As the flower was a subtle physical object, not entirely material in the ordinary sense of the word (though quite substantial and material in its own plane, not an illusion), a camera would not be able to detect it—except in the case of one of those abnormal interventions by which a subtle form has been thrown upon the material plate. It could be sensed in a dark room, though not so easily, and it would not then have so vivid an appearance—unless you are able to bring out something of the light of the subtle physical plane to surround it and give it its natural medium. If seen with the eyes shut, it would be no longer a subtle physical form, but an object or formation of the vital, mental or other plane—unless, indeed, the inner consciousness had progressed so far as to be able to project itself into the physical planes; but this is a rare and, in most cases, a late development. Page-261 2. It is not, usually, the object that vanishes; it is the consciousness that changes. Owing to lack of sustained capacity or lack of training, one is not able to keep the subtle physical vision which is what was really seeing the object. This subtle physical vision comes easiest in the moment between light sleep and waking—either when one just comes out of the sleep or when one is just going into it. But one can train oneself, to have it when one is quite wide awake. At first when one begins to see, it is quite usual for the more ill-defined and imprecise figures to last longer while those which are successful, complete, precise in detail and outline are apt to be quite momentary and disappear in an instant. It is only when the subtle vision is well developed that the precise and full seeing, lasts for a long time. This results from the difficulty of keeping what is still an abnormal consciousness and also, in this case, from the difficulty of keeping the two momentarily superimposed consciousnesses together. Page-262 3. There are all kinds in the experiences of each plane—symbolic forms, figures of suggestion, thought-figures, desire-formations or will-formations, constructions of all kinds, things real and lasting in the plane to which they belong and things fictitious and misleading. The haphazardness belongs to the consciousness that sees with its limited and imperfect way of cognizing the other worlds, not to the phenomena themselves. Each plane is a world or a conglomeration or series of worlds, each organized in its own way, but organized, not haphazard; only, of course, the subtler planes are more plastic and less rigid in their organisation than the material plane.
THIS gazing on a flame or a bright spot is the traditional means used by Yogis for concentration or for awakening of the inner consciousness and vision. You seem to have gone by the gazing into a kind of surface (not deep) trance, which is indeed one of its first results, and begun to see things probably on the vital plane. I do not know what were the "dreadful objects" you saw but that dreadfulness is the character of many things first seen on that plane, especially when crossing its Page-263 threshold by such means. You should not employ these means, I think, for they are quite unnecessary and besides, they may lead to a passive concentration in which one is open to all sorts of things and cannot choose the right ones.
6-8-1934 Page-264 |