Traces the various degrees of sight-perception from sightless sight of the inconscience through its ascending grades all the way up to the superconscient sight.
On Savitri
THEME/S
THE ASCENT OF SIGHT
IN SRI AUROBINDO'S SAVITRI
The Ascent of Sight
in Sri Aurobindo's Savitri
Jugal Kishore Mukherjee
Sri Aurobindo International Centre of Education
Sri Aurobindo Ashram
Pondicherry
First Published: 9 September 2001
© Sri Aurobindo Ashram Trust 2001
Published by Sri Aurobindo International
Centre of Education, Pondicherry
Printed at Sri Aurobindo Ashram Press
Pondicherry - 605 002
PRINTED IN INDIA
This is the tenth book coming from the pen of Jugal Kishore Mukherjee who has been residing as an inmate for the last fifty-two years in the Sri Aurobindo Ashram, Pondicherry, and has been teaching there various subjects to the students of the Higher Course of SAICE (Sri Aurobindo International Centre of Education).
Each one of Mukherjee's previously published books, whether in English or in Bengali, has been the product of carefully conducted research in a separate field of its own. The present book also is no exception to this general characteristic of his literary productions.
The titles of the books Jugal Kishore Mukherjee has already presented to the readers testify to the author's keen interest in widely varied fields of Aurobindonian research. Here are, for example, the titles and subtitles of a few of his books:
1.The Destiny of the Body (The Vision and Realisation is Sri Aurobindo's Yoga).
2.From Man Human to Man Divine (Sri Aurobindo's Vision of the Evolutionary Destiny of Man).
3.Sri Aurobindo Ashram: Its Role, Responsibility and Future Destiny.
4.Sri Aurobindo: The Smiling Master (Humour in Sri Aurobindo's Writings).
5.Sri Aurobindo's Poetry and Sanskrit Rhetoric.
6.The Mystery of Death and the Conquest of Immortality (in Bengali).
7. The Way of Practicing the Integral Yoga (in two volumes in Bengali).
The present monograph, The Ascent of Sight in Sri Aurobindo's Savitri, will, we hope, be able to grip the interest of the discerning readers.
We are thankful to Dr. R.Y. Deshpande for his scholarly 'Foreword' which will greatly help in the proper appreciation of the content of the book.
Foreword:
In his introduction to the present monograph on The Ascent of Sight in Sri Aurobindo's Savitri Jugal Kishore Mukherjee says that he has been a lover and adorer of Savitri for the last five decades. His association with it is perhaps even longer than that going back to the time prior to the publication of its first volume in 1950, when it was coming out in several cantos in the Ashram periodicals. But to love and adore Savitri is to live in its bright, marvellous and unfailing grace. It is a means of doing sadhana itself, a sadhana that also progressively ascends to the ever-growing beatitude of the most wondrous and excellent until one gets totally identified with it. All barriers break and intuition dawns to bring rarer and richer insights. Objects beyond the reach of mortal sight come into sudden view and everything appears luminous with a perfect sense of congruity. A secret splendour is revealed and life is made ready to receive the gifts of the spirit. In the sights that radiate from Savitri, even things that are otherwise insenscient start corresponding to those that are objectively real in the dynamism of its operative powers. A new epiphany is disclosed and all creation becomes God's creation.
Any enterprise or application bearing this love and adoration for Savitri can therefore be considered to be indeed its own reward. But it could also come in the form of a singular study from which others too can greatly profit. We have here from Jugal Mukherjee precisely such an exegesis which will prove valuable to the kindred seeker souls, helping them to see in Savitri the widening dimensions of the truth itself. Many more eyes open to its multiple glories
and sight itself begins to climb supernatural heights. It deals with these aspects with a wide masterly sweep ranging from'" the physical to the profoundly spiritual. Mukherjee traces the entire curve running through space and time as well as entering into the domains wherefrom arrives the true sight that supports everything. But the question is: What is this sight and what are these eyes? We may have a quick look at it to appreciate the nature of the ascending series of sight itself.
From Galileo to Hubble telescope in the outer sky, it has been a long leap of science. The sight that would show us the dark spots on the sun has now travelled to the farthest reaches of the universe. Yet the end doesn't seem to be in sight. The 240-cm eye looking at the galaxies receding swiftly away from us is puzzled at the miracle that lies beyond its gaze. So also is the microscopic vision scanning distances at the atomic levels. It all seems to be a wavy dance with the substantial entities masked behind the instrument's alertness. Designed with one of the objectives of studying the universe and put in the orbit at a cost of $ 1.5 billion, the Hubble is a marvel of technology unparalleled in history. It weighs 11 tons on earth, is 13.2 m in length and has a diameter of 4.2 m at its maximum. But the cold universe doesn't breathe life in its amazing peep. This eye cannot show us the "invisible day of our night",- to use Arjava's phrase.
In that respect our eye spans sights beyond sights. It enables us to see objects at variable distances and under different conditions of light. An incredible biological evolution has brought out a complex structure by which this wonder is achieved. For an optician our eye may simply be
an advanced camera having many similarities with its functioning. But an ophthalmologist looks at it in some other details. If the cornea, the iris, the pupil and the lens act like an optical system controlling and focusing light rays onto the retina, the retina senses them and creates impulses that are sent through the optic nerve to the brain. Macula, a small specialised area in the retina, contains certain specific light-sensitive cells that allow us to see fine details. The optic nerve connects the eye to the brain. It carries the impulses to it where they are interpreted as images. In the entire process the optical aspect slowly starts becoming a mini-computer with several layers of information getting processed in a complex sequence until the object is recognised by us.
But there are eyes and eyes. Once in a while we experience the "artifice of eternity". There are also eyes that draw "peacefulness from tarns on mountain tops". Abanindranath Tagore affirmed that "every artist must first weave to his own design a dream-catcher's net." In that endeavour he must develop a sight almost yogic in character and from that should come the arts of painting and sculpture. He must mould "Time's clay to everlasting Art". When one has not trained one's vision one sees imprecisely, says the Mother. Plato's eye views a wonderful world of forms of which things are just remote copies here. A technique, rather a faculty of vision that sees objects with another sensitivity, has been highly specialised in India. A seer's knowledge is a visioned truth and that is why it is called a Darshan. But sight does not stop simply at seeing the metaphysics of the world or in defining a shape for the abstract. Perhaps it goes even beyond to grasp the form
standing behind the formless. There seems to be another eyesight which, without the instrumental aid, can see far distances both in space and time. Let us take some examples.
In the Ramayana we come to the episode after the abduction of Sita when the efforts to locate her whereabouts are on. The party sent by Sugriva to find her has arrived at the inaccessible Vindhya Mountain. But as yet there is no success in fulfilling the difficult mission, as there are no clues available to carry out the search. While all were in a state of despondency Sampati, the elder brother of Jayatu who was killed by Ravana, approaches them for his own reasons. But soon he understands the nature of the task they are engaged in. Seeing their helpless plight Sampati tells them that he could easily see the presence of Sita in the far Ashoka Vane in the south some 100 yojanas (1200 km) away from that place. He also tells them that he could spot her there unmistakably, for he belongs to that class of birds whose flight is the highest in the sky; by the potency of his birth he has that natural sight to see objects at great distances. Sampati also tells the party about the prediction made by the Rishi Nishakara who could by the power of his tapasya foresee future events, that Rama would succeed in getting Sita back.
We have been told about the third eye of Shiva. It has another power. The bodacious demons were causing havoc and the world was in trouble. The gods were concerned, but they were also helpless. They knew that if only Shiva married and begot a son could the menace be stopped. This son of Shiva alone could become the leader of the divine army and their rescuer. But Shiva was absorbed in meditation and none dared disturb him. There was however a sense
of urgency and hence Kamadeva was sent by the gods to arouse Shiva's passion for Parvati. But when Shiva opened his third eye Kamadeva was burned to ashes. In the meanwhile, however, the deed was done and Skanda was bom. Later, at the pleading of Kamadeva's wife Rati, her husband was revived. This is an eye that is turned towards action in the destruction of all that is evil, a destruction by which the divine task is furthered.
It is said that in the case of a Yogin the third eye in the middle of the forehead becomes visible during deep meditation. This eye is also known as the star of the East, or the inner eye, or the dove descending from heaven; it is the eye of intuition which can open in him and show him the worlds otherwise lying hidden from sight. Since the third eye will give him whatever he asks for, it is important that the Yogin should possess a certain capacity, adhikāara, to hold the gifts ensuing from its occult power which if misused can prove to be disastrous. The gift is meant to further his spiritual progress.
According to the Tibetan lore the third eye is "the director of energy or force, and thus an instrument of the will of the Spirit... It is the eye of the inner vision, and he who has opened it can direct and control the energy of matter, see all things in the Eternal Now, and therefore be in touch with causes more than with effects, read the akashic records, and see clairvoyantly... It is through the medium of this 'all-seeing eye' that the Adept can at any moment put Himself in touch with his disciples anywhere." (A Treatise on Cosmic Fire, p. 1010/1)
In the Gita the war reporter Sanjaya had televisionic eye by which he could see all the events taking place on the
battlefield; thus he could narrate the happenings to the blind king Dhritarashtra. This was a gift he had received from. Vyasa. We are also told in the Gita that the "human eye can see only the outward appearances of things or make out of them separate symbol forms, each of them significant of only a few aspects of the eternal Mystery." But Arjuna wished to see the imperishable Self of the pre-eminent Being. He was given a divine eye, divya chakshu. With that the Master of the great Yoga showed him his supreme Form. Arjuna saw what was never seen before. "Neither by the study of Vedas and sacrifices, nor by gifts and universal rites or severe austerities," Arjuna is told, "can this form be seen." The infinite Godhead with the cosmic manifestation spreading in its splendour everywhere is what he saw with that sight. But it was a sight that brought the vision of the Time-Spirit specifically poised for the destruction of nations. It was an "overwhelming, appalling" form, and Arjuna was eager to see the earlier reassuring gracious form, close to him, friendly and intimate, approachable to him, familiar and dear to his heart. The sight that was granted to him was too great to bear. It was a sight meant to see one particular aspect of the supreme and the sights that lie beyond it can open out only by going to the worlds past the cosmic manifestation. The ascent of sight has to continue not only to see the triple glory in the superconscient but also its manifestive play in this material creation. Rare is such a sight even for the Yogins to possess
We have in St. Matthew the following: "The light of the body is the eye; if therefore thine eye be single, thy whole body shall be full of light." (6:22) If it is in connection with the treasures of heaven which can be spotted by this eye,
then it is a luminous seeing by which everything becomes luminous; by it even the body becomes full of light. A remarkable revelation it indeed is.
When in Savitri Sri Aurobindo says that Aswapati saw the Omnipotent's flaming pioneers crowding the amber stairs of birth (p. 343), certainly he must have seen them with the supramental sight. In it alone is the infallibility of the vision. He saw the sun-eyed children with the eyes brighter than even their eyes. Is that the ultimate sight? Although it is a supramental sight it is a sight which is here only in a certain context, the context of the evolutionary need to make the next decisive leap. There is also the gaze of two tranquil eyes that look into man's and see the god to come. (p. 335) In the entire Aurobindonian fulfillment there is the topaz wonder looking at rapt divinities in all forms.
When one reads Sri Aurobindo's Savitri one opens oneself to the infinity of sight. It is not only an inspired mantra with the power to establish fully what it utters but is also a revelatory vision that gives to the Unmanifest a luminous shape in manifestation. In it the silence speaks of forms that can become living realities even in this material creation. Within, without, around, everywhere there is the splendid urge to make those realities patent upon earth in the triple richness of the truth-conscient happiness. The supreme sense of delight gathers in its essentiality all the other senses.
In his beautiful study of the ascent of sight presented here, Jugal Kishore Mukherjee aptly draws our attention to Sri Aurobindo's explicit statement about it: "This essential sense [samjāna] is the original capacity of consciousness to feel in itself all that consciousness has formed and to feel
it in all the essential properties and operations of that which has form, whether represented materially by vibration of sound or images of light or any other physical symbol." It is here in samjāna that we have the primary source of all perception. Savitri takes us to that source of true sense.
Tracing the various degrees of sight-perception our learned author takes us from sightless sight of the inconscience through its ascending grades all the way up to the superconscient sight. The Upanishadic golden lid is lifted and is left behind the cosmic gaze of overmind and at once one has the Sachchidananda vision of all existence. It is a sight by which the ultimate reality sees itself dynamically in manifestation. Sachchidananda sees himself by the supra-mental sight, sees his own being and the entire manifestation of himself, beyond space and time as much as in space and time, the omnipresent reality in its splendid vastness. What otherwise appears dark assumes significance in its full operative sense.
When about a year ago I had requested Jugal Kishore Mukherjee to contribute an article for the second volume of Perspectives of Savitri I had left the choice of the theme entirely to him. In retrospect I feel happy about that decision. The result is the present monograph that has brought out another perspective of the multi-dimensional epic that Savitri is. But of necessity I had to put an unfortunate condition regarding the length of the article, as I had to accommodate some two dozen contributions in a limited spate of about five hundred pages. I am glad that Jugal Mukherjee wisely disregarded my stipulation and allowed his inspiration to flow unhampered, without any constraints of outward circumstances. We have now an
absorbing study that will be accepted as a significant contribution. I think it marks a moment of our moving from general discussions of Savitri-subjects to specialised aspects focusing on one theme or another. Perhaps that will be one way of entering into Savitri's sublimities and profundities that also spread outward to establish Sachchidanandaic realities in the world.
R.Y. DESHPANDI
I have been studying Savitri, the inestimable epic of Sri Aurobindo, regularly and assiduously for the last five decades; indeed, since the time in 1950 and 1951 when the entire Poem came out for the first time in book-form in a two-volume edition.
Also, being a teacher in the Higher Course of SAICE (Sri Aurobindo International Centre of Education), I have had the good fortune of studying Savitri in depth along with a number of senior students of SAICE who happened to opt in each academic Session since 1967 to make a meditative study of this super-creation of Sri Aurobindo which the Mother has characterised as ' 'the supreme revelation of Sri Aurobindo's Vision."
It needs no mention that I love and adore Savitri as so many other admirers of Sri Aurobindo do.
Now, over the years many of my friends and some students too have made an affectionate request to me to write something like an introduction to this great Epic. I appreciated their good will towards me but did not take their request seriously.
Recently, in a letter dated 2 April 2000, my friend and colleague Deshpandebhai (R. Y. Deshpande, a professor of Physics in SAICE and the associate editor of the cultural monthly Mother India) requested me to write an article on Savitri. He specified that the article could be about 10000-words long, that is, it could cover eighteen typescript pages in double-spacing.
So far as the theme is concerned, Deshpandebhai kindly left me free to choose any theme I found of interest in
Savitri; for, as he so aptly remarked in his letter, "Savitri is inexhaustible - and there is no doubt about it."
This time, I do not know why, I gladly acceded to Deshpandebhai's request and promised to send him my article by mid-August, 2000, the time-limit stipulated by him.
Days passed on after that and I was all the time thinking about what theme to choose for my projected article.
Strangely, one morning in the month of May last one of my students in the Savitri'-class asked me for some clarification as regards the singular line in the Epic: "A progress leap from sight to greater sight." (p. 177)
In a flash the decision came to me that this constant progression of sight from level to greater level should be the core-theme of my essay. For, immediately I remembered that Sri Aurobindo's Savitri is replete with references to scores of types of sights and visions and gazes and eyes pertinent to different planes of consciousness of man and functioning in various fields of supraphysical manifestation. A few of these sights that came to my mind in quick succession are as follows:
"mortal sight"; "witness sight"; "vision's sight"; "visionary sight"; "abstract sight"; "sightless sight"; "an immortal's sight"; "transcendent sight"; "cosmic sight"; "the Supreme's sight"; "the supreme sight"; "everlasting sight"; "ever-wakeful sight"; "original sight"; "originating sight"; "closed eyes' sight"; "inner sight"; "absolute sight"; "predicting sight"; "prophetic sight"; "intuitive sight"; "ideal sight"; "thinker's sight"; "sight of thought"; "soul's sight; "sight in the heart"; "Spirit's sight"; "spiritual sight"; "eternal sight"; "instinct's
sight"; "mind's sight"; "sight of the sage"; "dreamer's sight"; "eternal eye"; "wisdom's eyes"; "Immortal eyes"; "deathless eyes"; "Timeless Eye';-, "the Eye of eternity"; "Inner eye"; "the third eye"; "Spirit's eye"; "dull body's eye"; "eyes of creative bliss"; "all-seeing Eye above"; "unsleeping eye"; "God's eye"; "gods' eyes"; "reason's gaze"; "Godhead's gaze"; "Omniscient's gaze"; "unborn gaze"; "immortal gaze"; "gaze of life"; "seeing will"; "seeing mind"; "Matter's self-view"; "unageing look"; etc., etc.
So the theme was chosen. But the crucial question I had to tackle before I could put my pen to paper was this: What exactly is this 'sight' Sri Aurobindo is referring to when he speaks of "A progress leap from sight to greater sight"? Surely he is not adopting a mere rhetorical device here. These sights must be corresponding to something objectively real. But what type of objectivity ?
I earnestly prayed to Sri Aurobindo for the necessary light and then started giving shape to the ideas that came trooping into me. The 18-page limit set by Deshpandebhai was very soon crossed but the end of the journey was nowhere in sight.
Then I decided to forget all about Deshpandebhai's commission; instead, I opened myself to Sri Aurobindo and continued with my writing till it came to a natural stop. And it turned out to be fifty-one typescript pages and not just eighteen as wanted by my friend.
When the whole thing was over, I found to my happy surprise that my article has taken the shape of an original monograph on Savitri dealing with an as-yet-untouched novel aspect of the Epic.
I have been filled with a sense of great happiness while composing this monograph. At the same time I have learnt a good many things which were not clear to me before. Then I thought of bringing out my essay in a book-form so that it may be humbly placed before a wider circle of readers who, to borrow Deshpandebhai's words, "are interested, for various reasons, in the marvellous epic of Sri Aurobindo." (from his letter to the present writer, dated 2 April 2000)
So, such is the story behind the genesis of this modest-sized monograph.
J.K.M.
PS
I have not altogether forgotten my good friend Deshpandebhai nor the first impetus behind the planning of this essay. I propose to make an 18-page abridgement of this long article and pass that on to Deshpandebhai for whatever purpose he wants to use it.
Part One
Prolegomenon
Section I: Introduction
While studying with attention Sri Aurobindo's epic poem Savitri we come across two highly striking verses occurring at two different places almost a hundred pages apart. The first one is: "Out of our thoughts we must leap up to sight" (276)' while the second one is: "A progress leap from sight to greater sight." (177)
We said "striking" because in the consideration of the intellectuals thought is a far greater power than mere sight. Our sight is often erroneous in its reporting and misleading in its transcription. Not only that: the visual sense can only give us the superficial image of things and it needs the aid of thought to "fill and inform" the image. As Sri Aurobindo himself has pointed out:
"The intellect does not consider that it knows a thing until it has reduced its awareness of it to the terms of thought, not, that is to say, until it has put it into a system of representative mental concepts... It is true that the mind gets its knowledge primarily by various kinds of impressions... but these are taken by the developed intelligence only as data and seem to it uncertain and vague in themselves until they have been forced to yield up all their content to the thought and have taken their place in some intellectual
1. A single number placed after any quotation from Savitri refers to the page of the Centenary Edition of the Epic.
relation or in an ordered thought sequence." (The Synthesis of Yoga, p. 801)2
If so, the question arises, why are we asked by Sri Aurobindo to give up the human privilege of thought and take recourse to the inferior and uncertain faculty of sight?
Now about his second prescription of "A progress leap from sight to greater sight." We may conveniently couple it with the other explanatory statement of Sri Aurobindo: "If a further extension of knowledge is required, [one] can come at it by new seeing without the slower thought processes that are the staff of support of the mental search..." (Ibid., p. 803) (italics author's)
We wonder whether there can be sights and sights, any sight more authentic than the well-known physical sight which is, as we know, directly or indirectly dependent on the employment of physical sense organs.
Of course, it may be readily granted that apart from the well-known physical sight there may be other occasions or situations in which another sort of visualisation is quite possible and feasible. Leaving aside the dream phenomenon, three of these other enabling circumstances are:
1.the act of imagination;
2.the ingestion of psychedelic drugs; and
3.hallucinations induced during hypnotic 'sleep'.
Let us discuss in the barest outline these three alternative causative factors giving rise to non-physical visualisation outside the field of the evidence furnished by the physical sense organs
2. Unless otherwise indicated, all the editions of Sri Aurobindo's books referred to are those included in the Sri Aurobindo Birth Centenary Library (SABCL).
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1.Imagination: Every human being is endowed with the remarkable faculty of imagination more or less developed depending on the particular individual. We can easily enough imagine a tall green tree with thick foliage or a gurgling river with boats sailing on it or a high-rise building with shiningly white walls and so on and so forth. But it is obvious that these visualisations, however vivid and detailed in content, are nothing but subjective constructions terminable at will: in no way do they measure up to any objective reality existent in some objective space. It goes without saying that these imaginative exercises in visualisation do not fall in the category of Sri Aurobindo's "greater sight".
Now, let us go to the consideration of the second source of non-physical vision, the ingestion of a potent psychedelic drug possessing the capacity of temporarily altering the state of the consciousness of the viewer.
2.Psychedelic Drugs: The well-known novelist and writer Aldous Huxley did some personal experiments on the effect of the drug mescalin, and claimed in his book The Doors of Perception that in suitable doses this drug 'changes the quality of consciousness very profoundly'. Huxley took his pill of mescalin sitting in his study and facing a vase of flowers. After half an hour, he claimed, these flowers became transfigured and gave him mystical vision. Huxley's attention was then drawn to a wooden chair in the room, which also shone with inner light. Here are some pertinent words of Huxley:
"The Beatific Vision, Sat-Chit-Ananda, Being-Awareness-Bliss: for the first time I understood, not on the verbal level, not by inchoate hints or at a distance, but precisely
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and completely what these prodigious syllables referred to."
Was this then a new kind of vision conforming to the specification of Sri Aurobindo's "greater sight"? Alas, the answer is NO. For R.C. Zaehner, after having gone through Aldous Huxley's book, took mescalin himself and wanted to verify whether in his case too Huxley's supraphysical mystical visions would be reproduced, thus validating their subjective-objectivity. But the results were almost opposite to those in Huxley's case. Zaehner's damaging conclusion was that the experiences produced by mescalin were simply trivial, though they seemed hilariously funny.
Thus the visions appearing in the altered state of consciousness produced by psychedelic drugs are all hallucinations and subjective fancies and formations not corresponding to anything objectively real. (Vide Geoffrey Parrinder, Mysticism in the World's Religions, 1976, p. 179) Let us now probe the case of hypnotic visions.
3. Hypnosis and Hallucinations: Investigators over the centuries have discovered one great truth about the functioning of human mind. This may be formulated in the words of Leslie D. Weatherhead as follows: "If the mind really accepts an idea as true, and if the idea is reasonable, it [the idea] tends, by means of unconscious processes, to actualise itself or come true." (Psychology, Religion and Healing, 1952, p. 117)
Well, the whole phenomenon of hypnosis is based on this. Dr. Liebault has described seven stages of hypnosis: in the fifth stage illusions can be successfully suggested to the patient. Dr. Weatherhead conducted extensive investigation on a young woman called Ethel and here is a passage from his writing relevant to the topic under discussion:
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"Ethel could also be induced to have hallucinations. When told by me that a lovely black cat was asleep in the couch near her knees, she sat up, described if (!) and went through the movements of stroking it. On another occasion, on being given a blank postcard and told it was a photograph of the Prince of Wales, she admired it and described it, going into details about his uniform and staring all the time at a blank card." (Ibid., p. 123)
Dr. Weatherhead's experiments convincingly demonstrated that although the visions appeared to the subject to be absolutely real and concrete, they did not correspond to anything really 'real' and existent in any objective space.
Our short discussion of the three possible situations of imagination, ingestion of consciousness-altering drugs and hypnosis may lead us to doubt the objective validity of any and every kind of supraphysical vision. And in fact most of the skeptical thinkers hastily conclude that all the cases of so-claimed inner sights and visions are nothing but subjective fancies and formations: there can be but one true sight and that is the objective physical sight occasioned by physical sense-organ.
Does then Sri Aurobindo's affirmation of "from sight to greater sight" lose all meaning? Surely not. We shall come to the discussion of this very important point with precision and thoroughness a little later in the course of our essay. For the present let us bear in mind a very significant characteristic of Sri Aurobindo's Savitri.
Sri Aurobindo has not only affirmed the necessity of "A Progress leap from sight to greater sight", but a close study of his epochal epic Savitri reveals to our delightful surprise that the entire composition is shot through and through with
a panoramic depiction of the 'progression of sight' from plane to plane of the evolving consciousness of an individual being, also from world to world of the hierarchically arranged fields of cosmic manifestation, starting from the blind sight of the "sightless Inconscient" up to the "all-seeing closed eyes" of the supreme Superconscient. But an uninformed reader may perhaps unwarily think that all this magnificent depiction of sights and visions in Savitri is the imaginative product of the creative genius of a supremely gifted poet.
But we should never forget that both Sri Aurobindo and the Mother have categorically affirmed on many occasions that the whole of Savitri is a very precise and authentic transcription of their spiritual-visional experiences: not a single line has been introduced in the body of this epic simply to satisfy the exigencies of a sublime and superb poetical creation. There is everywhere in the Poem "a spiritual objectivity, an intense psycho-physical concreteness." (Sri Aurobindo: Savitri, Cent:'Ed., p. 750)
As the point is of crucial importance and as all doubts and misgivings in this regard should better be dispelled at the very outset, we crave the indulgence of our readers to quote in extenso a few passages from Sri Aurobindo's and Mother's writings where they speak unambiguously about the nature of the composition of Savitri. The whole of Section II below is entirely devoted to the reproduction of their observations vis-à-vis the issue under discussion.
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Section II:
(1) The Mother to Mona Sarkar:
"All the secrets that man possessed, He [Sri Aurobindo]
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has revealed, - as well as all that awaits him in the future; all this is found in the depth of Savitri. But one must have the knowledge to discover it all, the experience of the planes of consciousness, the experience of the Supermind, ... He has noted all the stages, marked each step in order to advance integrally in the integral yoga. All this is his own experience, and what is most surprising is that it is my experience also.... Each object, each event, each realisation, all the description, even the colours are exactly what I saw and the words, phrases are also exactly what I heard.... Yes, all the descriptions, the colours, the pictures I had seen, the words I had heard, all, all,... put by him in poetry, into miraculous poetry.... I repeat, it was not that I had told him my experiences and that he had noted them down afterwards, no, he knew already what I had seen. It is my experiences he has presented at length and they were his experiences also. It is the picture of our joint adventure into the unknown or rather into the Supermind. (Sweet Mother, pp. 26, 27 and 28)
(2)Sri Aurobindo to Amal Kiran (K.D. Sethna):
"I have not anywhere in Savitri written anything for the sake of mere picturesqueness or merely to produce a rhetorical effect; what I am trying to do everywhere in the poem is to express exactly something seen, something felt or experienced; if, for instance, I indulge in the wealth-burdened line or passage, it is not merely for the pleasure of the indulgence, but because there is that burden... in the vision or the experience." (Savitri, Cent. Ed., p. 794)
(3)Sri Aurobindo in the context of his poem "Thought the Paraclete":
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"But they are not padding; ... only some large lines are given, but the description is true, the epithets hit the reality and even the colours mentioned in the poem, 'gold-red feet' and 'crimson-white mooned oceans', are faithful to experience." ( Ibid., p, 797 )
[Writer's note: These observations of Sri Aurobindo apply with equal aptitude to all that is there in Savitri.]
(4) Sri Aurobindo apropos of the following passage from Savitri:
"All grew a consecration and a rite.
Air was a vibrant link between earth and heaven;
The wide-winged hymn of a great priestly wind
Arose and failed upon the altar hills;
The high boughs prayed in a revealing sky."
( Savitri, p. 4 )
"The picture is that of a conscious adoration offered by Nature and in that each element is conscious in its own way, the wind and its hymn, the hills, the trees. The wind is the great priest of this sacrifice of worship, his voice rises in a conscious hymn of aspiration, the hills offer themselves with the feeling of being an altar of the worship, the trees lift their high boughs towards heaven as the worshippers, silent figures of prayer, and the light of the sky into which their boughs rise reveals the Beyond towards which all aspires. At any rate this 'picture' or rather this part of the vision is a complete rendering of what I saw in the light of the inspiration and the experience that came to me.... This last line ['The high boughs prayed in a revealing sky'] is an
expression of an experience which I often had whether in the mountains or on the plains of Gujarat or looking from my window in Pondicherry not only in the dawn but at other times..." (Ibid., p. 790)
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Section III:
Analysis of the Process of "Seeing"
It has by now been made sufficiently clear that Sri Aurobindo's epic poem Savitri embodies his visional experiences (and of the Mother's too) in all their depth and height and comprehensiveness. We may venture to call Savitri "A panoramic Vision of the Ascent of Sight". Indeed, it is with a thrill that we discover, mentioned in the body of this great Poem, hundreds of different "sights" with their nature precisely delineated and their respective places and values clearly indicated. To satisfy the curiosity of the readers we mention below only a few representative ones amongst the various "sights" and "eyes", etc., referred to by Sri Aurobindo in his epic Savitri. (Please note that there is no logical or psychological sequential order in the following enumeration: Sri Aurobindo's expressions have been jotted down in the order they have come to the writer's mind.) Here is the brief list:
"ordinary mortal sight", "vision's sight", "visionary sight", "abstract sight", "sightless sight", "an immortal's sight", "transcendent sight", "cosmic sight", "the Supreme's sight", "the supreme sight", "ever-lasting sight", "ever-wakeful sight", "original sight", "originating sight", "closed eyes' sight", "inner sight", "absolute sight", "prophetic sight", "predicting sight", "intuitive sight", "ideal sight", "thinker's sight", "sight of
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thought", "soul's sight", "sight in the heart", "Spirit's sight", "spiritual sight", "eternal sight", "instinct's sight", "mind's sight", "sight of the sage", "dreamer's sight", "eternal eye", "wisdom's eyes", "immortal eyes", "deathless eyes", "Timeless Eye", "the Eye of eternity", "Inner eye", "the third eye", "Spirit's eye", "dull body's eye", "eyes of creative Bliss", "all-seeing Eye above", "unsleeping eye", "God's eye", "gods' eyes", "reason's gaze", "Godhead's gaze", "Omniscient's gaze", "unborn gaze", "immortal gaze", "gaze of life", "seeing will", "seeing mind", "Matter's self-view", "unageing look", etc., etc.
Before we can appreciate in full this aspect of Savitri with its very rich harvest of "sights" and "visions" it would be advisable if we first form a very clear notion about what "sight" really signifies and what can possibly be its multiform levels of manifestation, widely varying in nature and quality, in value and importance, depending on the variability of the eight essential elements involved in any complete act of "seeing". These constitutive elements are:
1.the object to be "seen";
2.the space in which the object is placed;
3.the "light" which makes the object "viewable";
4.the presence or absence of any obstruction or obstacle intervening between the object and the viewer;
5.the optical sense-organ and its accompanying accessories;
6.the physiological-nervous phenomena produced in the visual apparatus of the would-be receiver of the "vision";
7.the sense-action of sight, this being the crucial link between the physico-physiological phenomena involved in
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any act of "seeing" and their subjective transcription in the consciousness of the "viewer"; and lastly
8. the particular nature and quality of the "consciousness", operating in the "viewer", which mysteriously transcribes the objective physico-physiological nervous phenomenon into an "objectum" of subjective sight and vision which is qualitatively absolutely distinct and different from what is mentioned in 6 above.
This eighth element is the most crucial factor in determining what type of sight or vision the viewer would have vis-à-vis the object he is "looking at". The readers are requested to ponder deeply over the process and implication of this last point, for this will have a great bearing on the proper comprehension of the discussion that is going to follow. Be it noted for the moment that although there is always a relationship and correspondence between the objective "objectum" the viewer is seeing and the subjective "objectum", its transcription, which belongs to the private domain of his "consciousness", these two "objecta" are radically different in nature and the objective "objectum" remaining the same in appearance, the subjective "objectum" produced in the field of the consciousness of the viewer may be widely divergent in the case of different persons.
In our unreflective thinking we may glibly assume, almost as an indubitable fact beyond all challenge, that every human being, unless suffering from some defect or disease of the visual organ system, will have the same identical subjective sight or vision of a given object, say a rose, placed before him. But this assumption is entirely invalid and not true to fact at all.
Why we make bold to say so will be made clear in the sequel of this essay.
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Section IV:
Elements Involved in the Act of "Seeing"
There is much that we are going to say in the present Section and in the two or three Sections hereafter which may meet with derisive cynicism in the minds of those who have been brought up in the atmosphere of contemporary rational-scientific education. We make no attempt to convince these sceptics about the validity of the affirmations we are going to make in the course of our discussion. For the present essay is not a polemical one: it does not want to indulge in any sterile debate in its rather limited span. All that we are going to say is meant solely for those amongst our readers who want to know the truth in this matter with an open mind and unbiased disposition. We cannot but recall in this connection the witty prayer uttered by the ancients and quoted in the title page of Dr. Leslie D. Weatherhead's book Psychology, Religion and Healing:
From the cowardice that shrinks from new truth, From the laziness that is content with half-truths, From the arrogance that thinks it knows all truth,
O God of Truth, deliver us.
Before we commence our discussion on the complex issue of the possibility of having different kinds of visions all valid and objectively real, we may very well cite a portion of a relevant letter of Sri Aurobindo addressed to the rather doubting mind of one of his beloved disciples:
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"...all this is not fancy or delusion, it is part of an occult science... [and is] not merely auto-suggestive or hallucinatory in its results, but, if one can get the key, veridical and verifiable. Your scepticism may be natural in a 'modem' man... natural but not justifiable, because very obviously inadequate to the facts observed; but once you have seen, the first thing you should do is to throw all this vapid pseudo-science behind you, this vain attempt to stick physical explanations on supraphysical things, and take the only rational course. Develop the power, get more and more experience, develop the consciousness by which these things come; as the consciousness develops, you will begin to understand and get the intuition of the significance." (Letters on Yoga, p. 938)
Enough for the prelude: let us now come to the discussion proper of our present thesis which affirms the almost infinite variability of supraphysical visions depending on the changes effected in the composition of the eight essential elements involved in any process of "seeing". These elements, as we have mentioned in Section III, are in brief: (1) the object; (2) the space; (3) the illuminating light; (4) any obstruction; (5) the sense organ; (6) sense action; (7) sense mind; and (8) the receiving consciousness. Now, none of these constitutive elements are at all simple belying the facile assumption of most men. Each of these eight constituents admits of many possible variations giving rise to many a kind of sights and visions through the mere permutation and combination of the widely varying constitutive elements. Element by element, we are now going to mention in brief a few possible alternative variations in each case.
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First Element:
Object Viewed:
The points to note in this case are:
1.A physical object placed in the physical space is not the only object possible.
2.Apart from the well-known physical world, there are in fact many other supraphysical worlds of reality. Each of them contains its corresponding beings, objects and functioning forces. All these beings, objects and forces can very well present themselves as objects of vision to faculties suited to their reception and, what is more notable, all these different types of faculties of vision are accessible to the consciousness of man if he only cares for their development.
3.Even a physical object does not exhaust the possibility of its reality only with its physical aspect. In the words of Sri Aurobindo, "There is a physical aspect of things and there is an occult supraphysical aspect - one need not get in the way of the other. All physical things are the expression of. the supraphysical." (Letters on Yoga, p. 938)
Thus every physical object has associated with it many other "layers" and "dimensions" of aspects which are not at all purely and solely derivations of the physical. So, the same physical object is apt to reveal different "sights" to the viewer depending on the latter's capacity of how far and to which depth of the object his "eye" can penetrate. Also, the vision will vary depending on which aspect of the object the viewer decides to concentrate upon to the exclusion of other aspects.
4.What is striking to note is the occult fact that not merely sensible physical objects but everything else also in the complex cosmos of manifestation, - thoughts, feelings,
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desires, hopes, fears, ideas, forces, etc., etc., - has a substance of its own, and therefore a corresponding form, and hence can be viewed as an object. In fact, Sri Aurobindo has gone so far as to assert that' 'there is nothing that it [the inner sense] cannot image or visualise or turn into sensory formations." (The Life Divine, p. 536)
Here is an experience of the Mother illustrative of how one can have concurrently two visions of the same object:
"When you look at a person physically, there is the complexion, the features, the expression; at the same moment, if you see this face in the subtle physical, you suddenly notice that one part of the face is one colours, another part another colours; that in the eyes there is an expression and a kind of light which were not at all visible; and that the whole has quite a different appearance and, above all, gives a very different feeling, which to our physical eyes would seem rather extravagant, but which to the subtle vision is very expressive and revealing of the character, or even of. the influences acting on this person. What I say here is the record of an experience that I had again a few days ago." [Collected Works of the Mother (CWM), Vol. 10, pp. 127-28]
The Mother's experience testifies to the fact referred to by Sri Aurobindo in The Life Divine that our consciousness has the power to live in more than one status at a time, one the outer and surface one, the other being an inner status, (p. 659)
Before closing our discussion on the first element, "Object", we may draw the attention of our readers to
another striking fact which is that the things inside can present themselves as suitable objects of vision. Here are two relevant passages from the writings of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother:
"Things inside can be seen as distinctly as outward things, whether in an image by the subtle vision or in their essence by a still more subtle and powerful way of seeing..." (Letters on Yoga, p. 944)
"...you have the vision of the truth of things behind their appearances. Instead of seeing things in the usual way, that is, from outside, ...you see things from within outwards, and the outer existence becomes an expression, more or less deformed, of what you see within: you are aware of the inner existence of beings and their form; their outer existence is only a more or less deformed expression of this inner truth. And it is because of this that I say that the basic equilibrium is completely changed. Instead of being outside the world and seeing it as something outside you, you are inside the world and see outer forms expressing in a more or less clumsy fashion what is within, which for you is the Truth." (CWM, Vol. 4, pp. 20-21)
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Second Element:
Space in Which the Object is Placed:
One almost universally accepted assumption is that there can be only one type of space, the physical space, and a physical object can be placed only in that physical space and viewed there. But this is not true according to the well-attested discoveries of occult science. There are many more
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spaces than this gross physical space, sthulākāsa. Indian mystical tradition has named them as cittākāsa, cittākāsa, vyoma, etc. We cannot but recall in this connection Sri Aurobindo's magnificent description of the 'soul space' in Book II Canto 14 of Savitri. Here are a few striking lines from that description:
"All there was soul or made of sheer soul-stuff:
A sky of soul covered a deep soul-ground....
There was a strange spiritual scenery,
A loveliness of lakes and streams and hills,
A flow, a fixity in a soul-space,
And plains and valleys, stretches of soul-joy,
And gardens that were flower-tracts of the spirit,
Its meditations of tinged reverie....
There all was beautiful by its own right
And needed not the splendour of a robe.
All objects were like bodies of the Gods..." (291-93)
We have been speaking of the existence of different spaces. Now the interesting fact is that every object of vision, even a physical object - yes, we insist, even a physical object - exists at the same time in all these different spaces with, of course, inevitably attendant changes. Now if you try to look at an object placing it in the background of a particular space you will have a different kind of sight depending on the space selected. Here is a pertinent passage from what the Mother spoke to one of her disciples on 27 February 1962:
"The world we live in is a world of images. It is not the
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thing itself in its essence, it is the reflection of the thing. One could say that we are, in our material existence, only a reflection, an image of what we are in our essential reality. And the modalities of these reflections bring in every error and falsification - what you see in the essence is perfectly true and pure and exists from all eternity; the images are essentially variable.... One could say that every circumstance, every event, every thing has a pure existence, which is the true existence, and a considerable number of impure or distorted existences, which are the existence of the same thing in the various domains of being." (CWM, Vol. 10, pp. 126-27)
We feel tempted to quote in this connection a few verses from Savitri which demonstrate pointedly how our familiar world of physical space with its physical objects appear differently to the penetrating Eye of someone who knows how to see behind. Santayana is describing his visions to Savitri on the occasion of their first meeting:
"Earth could not hide from me the powers she veils:
Even though moving mid an earthly scene
And the common surfaces of terrestrial things,
My vision saw unblended by her forms;
The Godhead looked at me from familiar scenes....
The day and dusk revealed to me hidden shapes;
Figures have come to me from secret shores
And happy faces looked from ray and flame....
I caught for some eternal eye the sudden
Kingfisher flashing to a darkling pool...
And wandering wings nearing from infinity
Lived on the tablets of my inner sight;
Mountains and trees stood there like thoughts from
God." (401,405)
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Third Element:
Illuminating Light:
We invite our readers to abandon one more of their well-cherished pre-conceived notions. It is as regards the true and essential nature of the light which illuminates an object and makes it accessible to our sight. Most of us take it for granted without much discussion and deliberation that light is essentially a phenomenon of the physical world. But this is not true. Let us listen to Sri Aurobindo and ponder over the implication of what he has to say in the matter:
"... it must be noted that, contrary to our ordinary conceptions, light is not primarily a material creation and the sense or vision of light accompanying the inner illumination is not merely a subjective visual image or a symbolic phenomenon: light is primarily a spiritual manifestation of the Divine Reality illuminative and creative; material light is a subsequent representation or conversion of it into Matter for the purposes of the material Energy." (The Life Divine, p. 944)
Another interesting point we may note in this connection. Every plane of consciousness has its own characteristic light. Once when a sadhaka asked Sri Aurobindo whether a subtle physical object could be seen in a dark room with Open eyes, the latter replied to the surprise of the disciple:
"... a subtle physical object [such as a flower] (... quite
substantial and material in its own plane)... could be sensed even in a dark room [if one is] able to bring out something of the light of the subtle physical plane to surround it and give it its natural medium." (Letters on Yoga, pp. 949-50)
It is not only that every plane has its own light, every level of consciousness too has its characteristic light which can proceed to the object viewed, in the manner of a flashing torch-light, and illuminate it. Here are some isolated lines from Savitri which may interest the readers in this connection:
"A timeless Light is in his hidden eyes..." (49)
"Some vision seen in the omniscient light..." (Ill)
"Raised into a splendid point of seeing light..." (362)
Let us close our short discussion on the light that illuminates, and pass on to the consideration of the fourth element, "Obstruction".
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Fourth Element:
Obstruction to the Sight:
As in the case of an ordinary physical sight the interposition of an opaque obstacle in between the viewer of an object and the object itself is liable to prevent the vision of the object from taking place, so in the case of a subtle supraphysical vision the "seer" has to take care that no "opaque" psychological obstacle intervenes between his ' 'eye'' of vision and the reality of the object viewed. Some of these possible obstructions are well-known: (1) the insistent outward-darting action of the physical senses; (2) the turbidity and restlessness of vital desires; (3) the agitated activity of the thinking mind; (4) pronounced
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preferences and antipathies for and against anyone or anything, etc.
In the presence of any such or similar obstruction, the sight or vision of the viewer is liable to get distorted, falsified or even completely checkmated. Thus our mind's throbs and the vitals' heaving's have to be stilled before we can hope to have our inner consciousness awakened and functioning, offering us a vision pure and unclouded.
It is worth mentioning at this point that the illuminating light itself may at times act as an obstacle to a more profound vision. Just as the light of the sun shining during daytime obliterates the vision of the billions of stars present in the heavenly vault above, so a lesser but prominent and proximate light emanating from a relatively lower level of consciousness may blot out from before the seer's vision a far greater truth of the reality. Did not the Rishi of the Isha Upanishad send up his passionate appeal to Pushan, the Godhead, to remove the veil of dazzlingly golden light which was covering the face of the Truth? - Hiranmayena pātrena satyasyāpihitarh mukham. (Isha Upanishad, 15)
Here are some representative verses from Savitri referring to a few of the different types of veils and lids acting as obstacles to the spirit's vision:
(1)"Cast from thee sense that veils thy spirit's sight: In the enormous emptiness of thy mind
Thou shall see the Eternal's body in the world...'' (476)
(2)"... a curtain of bright mind
That hangs between our thought and absolute
sight..." (74)
(3)''The robes of mortal thinking were cast down
Leaving his knowledge bare to absolute sight..." (320)
(4)''Through a gleaming far-seen sky of wordless thought,
Through naked thought-free heavens of absolute
sight..." (632)
(5)"That subtle world withdrew deeply within
Behind the sun-veil of the inner sight." (527)
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Fifth Element:
Eye the Organ of Vision:
In our normal daily experience we proceed on the assumption that our physical eye is the only possible organ of vision and all sight has to depend on the proper employment of this physical eye. But this assumption too is not true to fact. Being governed by the overpowering experience of our physical mind we easily suppose that the fundamental thing in any "seeing operation" is the impression made by an external object on the physical organ of sight and that the only business of our mind which happens to be the present central principle of our consciousness is to receive the physical impression produced and its nervous translation and thus be aware of the object in question. But this account errs on many counts.
The physical eye belonging to the physical body is meant only for a limited range of physical sight. But we have bodies other than the physical one: the subtle body {suksma satire) and the causal body (kārana sarìra), and these bodies have their corresponding "eyes". Our total being is not constituted of the gross material sheath (annamaya kosa) alone which is all that is visible and sensible to us. It is prāncakosātmaka, made up of four more sheaths: a vital sheath (prānamaya kosa), a mental sheath (manomaya
kosa), a "knowledge" sheath (vijnānamaya kosa) and a "bliss" sheath (ānandamaya kosa). Each of these subtler sheaths possesses its own faculty of vision. In fact, what we can see with our "mortal" physical eye is an infinitesimal portion of the multilayered multidimensional world of cosmic manifestation. All that exists in all possible worlds -yes, all without exception - is accessible to the sight of a corresponding eye and, what is most notable, all these different "eyes" are already there in the different planes of consciousness of every human being, although now hidden and dormant behind the thick veils of ignorance. If we can once awaken these various faculties of sight, there is no limit to the extent and splendour of the inexhaustible fields of visions that will open up before us.
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Sixth Element:
Sense Action:
All of us know that in our normal "seeing" of a physical object, a very complex neurological-electrical process goes on behind our optical, organ, which alone gives rise to the visual sense action. Without this accompanying physiological process, so we believe, no sight is possible. But this too is an erroneous presupposition.
What is true is that all "seeing" arises basically out of a direct knowledge offered by the consciousness but because of our egoistic separative way of functioning we have divided the world into "self" and "not-self", into subject and object, and, then, in order to have the knowledge of the so-separated objects, we take recourse to indirect means like sense-organs and sense-actions. But this arrangement of external device elaborated in terrestrial life-evolution does
not and cannot abrogate the basic fact that the true sense-action is in the mind and not in the optical apparatus. Here is an illuminating passage from Sri Aurobindo's Kena Upanishad:
"Mind, subconscious in all Matter and evolving in Matter, has developed these physical organs in order to apply its inherent capacities of sight, hearing, etc. on the physical plane by physical means for a physical life... [But] sight and the other senses are not mere results of the development of our physical organs in the terrestrial evolution... they are inherent capacities [of Mind] and not dependent on the circumstance of terrestrial evolution and they can be employed without the use of the physical eye, ear, skin, palate." (SABCL, Vol. 12, p. 195)
If we admit the truth of what Sri Aurobindo's passage indicates, all our objections to the possibility of having suprasensuous supraphysical subtle vision of beings, objects, events, etc., cannot but vanish.
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Seventh Element:
Mind the Only Sense:
That mind is the real determinant in one's sense perception and not the sense organ nor the complex processes going on there was demonstrated by Dr. Leslie Weatherhead before a team of distinguished physicians and surgeons in the course of his experiments on a hypnotised subject Ethel already referred to on p. 5 of this essay. Dr. Weatherhead reports:
"Ethel's senses could all be controlled. If, when she was
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Hypnotised, I told her she would hear nothing, she could not detect a loud noise even close to her ears. If I told her sugar was bitter, she would spit it out, and she could smell several perfumes successively on being told that her handkerchief was drenched with them." (Op. cit., p. 124)
All this was, of course, imposed on the subject from outside by the hypnotist's suggestion and the sceptic may well aver that these sensory experiences of Ethel were merely her subjective constructions and did not in any way correspond to anything objectively real. But we would like to assert on other well-validated grounds that our mind has the inherent capacity of sensing directly something concretely physical existing in the physical space, without the employment of any physical organ or of any physiological process. To quote Sri Aurobindo:
"Mind is... able to assert its true character as the one and all-sufficient sense and free to apply to the objects of sense its pure and sovereign instead of its mixed and dependent action [as at present]." (The Life Divine, p. 63)
Sri Aurobindo has discussed this surprising point in great detail at four different places: in The Life Divine, in The Synthesis of Yoga, in his commentary on the Kena Upanishad, and, of course, in his Letters on Yoga. We quote here only one representative passage from his writings:
"... we have to realise first that the mind is the only real sense even in the physical process: its dependence on the Physical impressions is the result of the conditions of the material evolution, but not a thing fundamental and indis-
pensable. Mind is capable of a sight that is independent of the physical eye, a hearing that is independent of the physical ear, and so with the action of all the other senses." (The Synthesis of Yoga, p. 833)
We repeat: our mind's dependence for its sense perception on the elaborate system of physical sense organs considered as its "too imperative and exclusive conveyors" is only habitual and a transitional evolutionary device. In reality, mind is not only the "sixth sense" as it is often called but the only true sense and the other sense organs are no more than its outer conveniences.
Now this direct use of the mind as the only real sense is not a freak or an aberration in the case of some exceptional "mystics": it can be made constant and normal by proper psycho-spiritual training. To quote Sri Aurobindo again:
"Those who have carried the study and experimentation of them to a certain extent, have found that we can sense things known only to the minds of others, things that exist only at a great distance, things that belong to another plane than the terrestrial but have here their effects; we can both sense them in their images and also feel, as it were, all that they are without any definite image proper to the five senses." (SABCL, Vol. 12, pp. 194-95)
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Eighth Element:
Consciousness the Ultimate Determinant:
Our sustained pursuit of the discovery of the fundamental source of sense perception cannot rest with the action of the
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sense-mind, the Manas of the ancient Indian spiritual psychology: it has to proceed still further. For, as Sri Aurobindo has so trenchantly put it:
"...we have to realise - and this is more difficult to admit for our normal ideas in the matter - that the mind itself is only the characteristic instrument of sense, but the thing itself, sense in its purity, samjnāna, exists behind and beyond the mind it uses, and is a movement of the self, a direct and original activity of the infinite power of consciousness. The pure action of sense is a spiritual action and pure sense is itself a power of the spirit." {The Synthesis of Yoga, p. 833) (italics author's)
Making the point more explicit Sri Aurobindo says elsewhere:
"This essential sense [samjnāna] is the original capacity of consciousness to feel in itself all that consciousness has formed and to feel it in all the essential properties and operations of that which has form, whether represented materially by vibration of sound or images of light or any other physical symbol." (SABCL, Vol. 12, p. 195)
So we see that the deepest and highest consciousness of our inner subliminal being is the primary source of vision and sight: the subtle sense action through the psychical bodies are rather channels for this direct vision than its informants. But while speaking about consciousness we have to mention an important fact: it is that this consciousness itself in its actual functioning in a particular individual is very complex in its character. For just as in the case of
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physical light there are many different "colours", visible or invisible, in the visible spectrum or beyond, so in the case of consciousness there are many levels and ranges accessible to man, extending from the "blind" Inconscient up to the heights of the supreme Superconscient. And what is very pertinent to note is the inestimable privilege of any human being to have in his possession the latent capacity of developing, of being aware of, and finally of actively functioning in any of the levels of this immensely extended field of consciousness.
Thus one need not remain "limited by his outward surface or waking consciousness". Everyone has "a latent capacity [which can be perfected by training and practice] for entering into the experiences of the inner consciousness' '. (Letters on Yoga, p. 932)
The upshot of all this discussion on consciousness is that a particular "seer" focussing his attention on a given object with the employment of a particular level of consciousness different from that of the normal physical mind will have a different kind of sight of the object in view. This vision of the "seer" is bound to vary widely and naturally with the change in the quality and grade of the "seeing" consciousness. Thus there may possibly be a gross physical seeing, a subtle physical seeing, an ordinary vital seeing, an inner subliminal vital seeing, a common mental seeing, an inner mental seeing, a psychic seeing, a spiritual mental seeing with many variations in it, an overmental seeing and so on and so forth. And when we pass on to the Higher Hemisphere of Supermind and the trinity of Sachchidananda (Existence-Consciousness-Bliss), we first develop the exceptional capacity of possessing and exercising a supra-
mental sight, then the sight of the dynamically active Cosmic Divine, and, who knows, finally even the sight of the Supreme.
At this point let us end our short survey of the eight elements involved in any act of "seeing". Now, if we permute and combine all the different possibilities operating in each of these eight factors of vision, and for all the factors in the same way, we can easily imagine that there are bound to be visions and visions of all kinds and of every hue, varrying in the degree of their triviality or profundity, also in their respective value and importance. Indeed, as Sri Aurobindo has pointed out, there are inexhaustible ranges of sensory experience other than those of the outward physical which alone we are normally conscious of. (Letters on Yoga, p. 937)
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Section V:
The first question we have to answer is: What is, after all, a "vision"? Here are two passages from the Mother's writings which make the point absolutely unambiguous:
(1) "A vision is a perception, by the visual organs, of Phenomena that really exist in a world corresponding to the organ which sees. For example, to the individual vital plane there corresponds a cosmic vital world. When a human being is sufficiently developed he possesses an individualised vital being with organs of sight, hearing, smell, etc. So a Person who has a well-developed vital being can see in the vial world with his vital sight, consciously and with the memory of what he has seen. This is what makes a vision." (CWM, Vol. 10, p. 41)
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(2) "Vision is another plane of perception which awakes. It is the senses in the mind or vital or physical which wake up and manage to pass their experiences to the outer consciousness. It is as though one had another pair of eyes behind these, eyes which could see [other planes of consciousness] instead of seeing in the physical." (CWM, Vol. 7, p. 129)
The second question requiring answer is: Are visions a freak and abnormality? The answer is: No, the faculty of subtle sight is always there. Only, as one is concentrated in the most material life, one does not notice it.
For the normal functioning of this supraphysical occult sight, the conditions that have to be fulfilled are: (i) the quietening and the purification of the surface mind and vital; (ii) the opening up of the wall separating the outer mind and the inner consciousness; and, preferably, (iii) the capacity to enter freely within and dwell there at will. In this connection we may read with profit the following letter of Sri Aurobindo addressed to one of his disciples who wanted to know the truth about the matter:
"... this power or gift of [supraphysical sight] ... is a universal faculty present in all human beings, but latent in most, in some rarely or intermittently active, occurring as if by accident in others, frequent and normally active in a few. ...almost anyone, if he wants, can with a little concentration and training develop the faculty of supraphysical vision. ...It comes more easily with the eyes shut than with the eyes open, but it does come in both ways." (Letters on Yoga, p. 937)
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The third question that may haunt our mind sometimes is: What value is there in developing this faculty of subtle sight? The answer is: All visions have a significance of one kind or another. When rightly interpreted they can be of great help in the development of Sadhana. Also, by the opening of the inner vision, one becomes aware of the subtle planes of experience and of the worlds of existence other than the material, which are all the time exercising their occult influences to shape and govern our outer life and consciousness. The following quotation from Sri Aurobindo pithily sums up the matter:
"This power of vision... should not be rejected although it is not the most important thing - for the most important thing is the change of the consciousness." (Letters on Yoga, p. 931)
The fourth question that may intrigue some persons is: Is there any negative side to the free indulgence of the faculty of subtle vision? The answer is: Yes, all that comes in visions may not be true; some visions may be due to the mental or vital formations of the subject; some others may be introduced by some hostile occult forces and beings. Some visions may be nothing more than alluring falsehoods. Some others may come only with the purpose of sidetracking the spiritual aspirant from the main path of sadhana. So, in order to avoid all these dangers and pitfalls the sadhaka should develop in himself inner purity and sincerity, a clear mind, a power of luminous discrimination and above all an attitude of "benevolent indifference". In Sri Aurobindo's pointed recommendation:
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"...one must see and observe without attachment, keeping always the main object in front, realisation of the inner Self and the Divine". ( Letters on Yoga, p. 1027 )
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Part Two
The Ascent of Sight in Savitri
1. Failure of Thought:
Although the intellectuals are rightly proud of their faculty of rational thinking, "thought" fails miserably as an instrument for the acquisition of true Knowledge and Wisdom, also for the discovery of the deeper truths of existence and life. Hence the call of Sri Aurobindo: "Out of our thoughts we must leap up to sight..." (276)
Here are a few representative verses from Savitri touching the same theme.
(1)"I groped for the Mystery with the lantern, Thought.
Its glimmerings lighted with the abstract word
A half-visible ground and travelling yard by yard
It mapped a system of the Self and God.
I could not live the truth it spoke and thought." (407)
(2)"But thought nor word can seize eternal Truth:
The whole world lives in a lonely ray of her sun.
In our thinking's close and narrow lamp-lit house
The vanity of our shut mortal mind
Dreams that the chains of thought have made her ours;
But only we play with our own brilliant bonds;
Tying her down, it is ourselves we tie.
In our hypnosis by one luminous point
We see not what small figure of her we hold;
We feel not her inspiring boundlessness,
We share not her immortal liberty.
Thus is it even with the seer and sage;
For still the human limits the divine:
Out of our thoughts we must leap up to sight..."(276)
2. Failure of Ordinary Human Sight:
Sight is no doubt a far better instrument than the thinker's intellectual thought. But this sight cannot surely be equated with the normal sight of man whether physical or vital or even mental. Our habitual vision suffers from many serious disabilities. For example, it sees the part and misses the whole; its perception is limited to a short interval of time and cannot span the perspective of eternity; it hovers on the surface and cannot penetrate into the depths of a thing; it is easily satisfied with the form and does not hunt after the essence; etc.
Because of all these and similar deficiencies, Sri Aurobindo has used in Savitri many not-so-laudatory expressions to designate our customary human sight. Here are some of them: "erring sight"; "fallible gaze"; "scanty fringe of sight"; "ephemeral sight"; "single window's clipped outlook"; "immediate sight"; "external sight"; "surface sight"; "time-bom eyes"; "transient eyes"; "look of surface mind"; "ignorant eyes"; etc.
Here are some verses from Savitri pointedly bringing out the inherent penury of ordinary human sight:
(1)"And the inconstant blink of mortal sight" (343)
(2)"The future's road is hid from mortal sight" (425)
(3)"Absorbed and cabined in external sight" (245)
(4)"Our eyes are fixed on an external scene..." (52)
(5)"... eyes that see a part and miss the whole" (657)
(6)"... waking mind's small moment look" (49)
(7)"He cannot look on the face of the Unknown"
(690)
(8)"Earth's eyes half-see" (109)
(9)' 'Insentient to our eyes that only see
The form, the act and not the imprisoned God"
(157)
(10)"... the shadowy script
In which our sight transcribes the ideal Ray"
(265)
(11)"That look at images and not at Truth" (370)
(12)"Our mortal vision peers with ignorant eyes;
It has no gaze on the deep heart of things." (626)
(13)"But few can look beyond the present state" (52)
(14)"We cannot free our gaze to reach wisdom's sun."
(53)
(15)"Unmarked by the eye that sees effect and cause"
(54)
(16)"... vanishes from the chase of finite eyes" (272)
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3. Inner Vision:
Its Necessity and Value:
The faculty of subtle sight is a great aid to the aspirant who has the necessary intelligence and clarity of mind and a power of intuitive discrimination. Visions are one key to unlock the doors of the other worlds of cosmic manifestation that lie beyond and behind the physical. Visions can offer the Sadhaka a first contact with the Divine in his forms and powers. Vision is often a first door of entrance into the
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inner planes of one's own being and consciousness. Visions can be full of meaningful indications that may help one to acquire greater self-knowledge and knowledge of things or people or events. There are veridical visions that may lead to authentic prophecies and premonitions.
Such being the multiple benefits that supraphysical visions may offer us, Sri Aurobindo recommends us to "look into the depths" and "stare upward measuring the Unknown", to develop our "spiritual gaze" and "plunge our gaze into the siege of mist". Indeed, we should not stop with only one level of visionary sight; we should see to it that our vision "grow within" and we acquire the privilege of "visions of higher realms" and of "supernal Powers".
We give below some illustrative verses from Sri Aurobindo's Savitri indicating the progressive march of the power of vision and the happy results that may come out of it:
(1) "A progress leap from sight to greater sight" (177) (2) "On our road from Matter to eternal Self" (166)
(3)"Ever his consciousness and vision grew" (31)
(4)"A sight opened upon the invisible
And sensed the shapes that mortal eyes see not"
(540)
(5)"And called to its mounting vision peaks divine"
(87)
(6)"And vision climbs beyond the reach of Time"
(299)
(7)"His sight surpassed creation's head and base"
(300)
(8)"An eye has opened upon timelessness" (311)
(9) "A wide power of vision whence all could be seen"
(514)
(10)"A sight opened upon the invisible" (540)
(11)"He opens that third mysterious eye in man,
The Unseen's eye that looks at the unseen" (665)
(12) "Realm upon realm received her soaring view"
(676)
(13)"The inconscient's seal is lifted from our eyes"
(108)
(14)"Man's eyes could look into the inner realms"
(361)
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4 Sight:
Its Determinative Power:
It is a noteworthy fact that an immediate intuitive consciousness of things often leads to an immediate intuitive control of things. Also, a constantly held vision of what one would like to happen helps the thing to grow into a reality. There is a significant passage on p. 302 of Mother's Questions and Answers 1953 as regards the action of the Supermind in the world. The Mother says inter alia:
"... it is conscious of the difference between the world as it is and the world as it ought to be. Every moment it sees the gulf between what is and what should be, between the truth and the falsehood that is expressed. And constantly it keeps this vision of the Truth which broods over the world, so that as soon as there is a little opening, it may descend and manifest itself."
About the controlling and mastering power of sight it is
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worth quoting here a passage from Sri Aurobindo's The Life Divine (p. 535):
"All the movements of the surface being can be seen ... with a direct sight in the consciousness by which the self-delusions and mistakes of self of the outer consciousness can be dispelled; there is a keener mental vision ... of our subjective becoming, a vision which at once knows, commands and controls the whole nature."
Sri Aurobindo has referred in many ways to this controlling and creative power of sight in his Epic Savitri. Here are a few illustrative examples: "growing by his gaze"; "determining mandate of their eyes"; "his gaze had power"; "mild gaze uninsistent ruled"; "eyes that rule"; "mastering gaze"; "drew from sight spiritual power"; "its gaze controls"; etc. Now a few illustrative verses from Savitri:
(1) "He regards the icon growing by his gaze..." (23)
(2) "He mastered the tides of Nature with a look" (219)
(3)"Infallibly by Truth's directing gaze
All creatures here their secret self disclose" (272)
(4)"Its gaze controls the turbulent whirl of things"
(571)
(5)"That mightier spirit turned its mastering gaze"
(573)
(6)"He who now stares at the world with ignorant eyes
Hardly from the Inconscient's night aroused,
That look at images and not at Truth
Can fill those orbs with an immortal's sight." (370)
(7)''It drew from sight and sound spiritual power'' (236)
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5. "Originating Sight":
Its Greatness:
According to the Old Testament theology, at the beginning of creation God said, "Let there be Light" and "there was light." Thus the "original Sound", parā vāk, became the primal agency behind the process of cosmic manifestation. The Upanishadic Rishis looked at the issue from a somewhat different angle. In their vision, at the very beginning everything remained unmanifest and dormant in the bosom of the absolute immobility of the passive Brahman. When the Supreme opened his "closed eyes" (unmìlana) and "he saw" (sa aiksata), then only the creation or the manifestation began its stupendous journey.
And what about the evolutionary movement that is taking place upon our globe? That too has been initiated because of the pressure of the Supreme's Sight acting upon the deep sleep of the Inconscient base so that it might wake and "look around".
And this was not confined to the commencement alone. In fact, the whole course of this evolutionary manifestation is being sustained and guided in its long itinerary by the wisely controlling gaze of Sachchidananda.
The following verses from Savitri bring out this secret truth behind the processes of creation, manifestation and evolution.
(1)Before the manifestation:
"In God's supreme withdrawn and timeless hush
A seeing Self and potent Energy met'' (284)
(2)God's self-vision:
"The images of its ever-living Truth
Look out from a chamber of its self-wrapt soul:
As if to its own inner witness gaze" (111)
(3) Joint creation by the Ishwara and the Shakti:
"The Master and the Mother of all lives
Watching the worlds their twin regard had made"
(525)
Thus the manifestation arose "Imagined by some creative Eye" (547), by "the creative Eye of Eternity" (41). Now about the evolutionary movement at its different stages:
(1)"God's summits look back on the mute Abyss" (541)
(2)"Because eternal eyes turned on earth's gulfs
The lucent clarity of a pure regard" (101)
(3)' 'Attracted by the unfathomable regard
The unsolved slow cycles to their fount returned" (307)
(4)"A Seer within who knows the ordered plan...
Inspires our ascent to viewless heights" (101)
(5)' 'Compelled the forward stride, the upward look'' (539)
(6)"A mind began to see and look at forms" (101)
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6. Consciousness:
Its Quadridirectional Movement:
There are four different types of "looks" possible for the normal waking consciousness of man: a "downlook", an "inlook", an "outlook" and an "uplook". To understand well the real significances of these rather odd terms, we have to remember that what we habitually know ourselves to be is not all we are: it is no more than "a bubble on the ocean of our total field of existence". At first glance this may come as an assertion altogether unbelievable but still it
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remains a fact that apart from the very insignificant and restricted part of our waking individual consciousness, we are normally perfectly ignorant of the whole of the rest of our being, "the immense more", that lies hidden in apparently inaccessible "reaches of being which descend into the profoundest depths of the subconscient and rise to highest peaks of superconscience, or which surround the little field of our waking self with a wide circumconscient existence of which our mind and sense catch only a few indications." (Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis of Yoga, pp. 498-99) (italics author's)
Now, through the process of the widening of our consciousness by yogic sadhana it is possible for us to extend our vision into our circumconscient part; by the deepening or inwardization of our consciousness we may very well look into our intraconscient subliminal range of being; and by the heightening of the consciousness we can project our sight into the superconscient region. We may also cast our gaze downward to plunge it into the obscure recesses of our subconscient part. There is a still more submerged region, the Inconscient, which is the dark basis of all earthly manifestation.
The following verses from Savitri refer in brief to the surface, the height, the depth and the wideness of our consciousness:
"But knowledge ends not in these surface powers
That live upon a ledge in the Ignorance
And dare not look into the dangerous depths
Or to stare upward measuring the Unknown.
There is a deeper seeing from within
And, when we have left these small purlieus of mind,
A greater vision meets us on the heights
In the luminous wideness of the Spirit's gaze." (168)
Let us now proceed to the exploration of the nature of sight in these different hidden zones of our being.
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7. Sight in the Inconscient:
The Inconscient is at the basis of this material world, where the Divine has, as it were, hidden himself in what seem to be his opposites, Non-Being, Insentience and Non-delight. This Inconscient seems to have created the material universe by its inconscient Energy, but this is only an appearance. For in the Inconscient there is an involved Consciousness with endless possibilities, a concealed and self-imprisoned Divine, imprisoned in Matter but with every potentiality held in its secret depths. (Letters on Yoga, p. 26)
While referring to this Inconscient Sri Aurobindo has used many striking expressions. Here are just a few of them: "eyeless waste"; "eyeless depths"; "battlefields of the Abyss"; "A leaden Nescience"; "viewless vast"; "eyeless muse"; "closed eyes of vanished memory"; "fixed regardless eyes"; "dead and staring eyes"; "blinded eyes"; etc.
Here are some representative verses from Savitri depicting the Inconscient:
(1)"An Eye unseen in the unseeing vast" (168)
(2)' 'To its own sight unrecognisable'' (331)
(3)"... the Inconscient's depths
That veil themselves from their own regard" (449)
(4)"A cavity filled with a blind mass of power" (489)
(5)"A heavy barrier of unseeing sight" (489)
(6)"Truth stares and does her works with bandaged
eyes" (494)
(7)"In the uncaring trance it groped for sight" (129)
(8)"God hid himself from his own view" (222)
(9)"His being from its own vision disappeared" (218)
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8. Sight in the Subconscient:
The subconscient part of our being represents an obscure unconsciousness or half-consciousness submerged below and inferior in its movements to our organised waking awareness. It is in Sri Aurobindo's words "the Inconscient vibrating on the borders of consciousness, sending up its motions to be changed into conscious stuff, swallowing into its depths impressions of past experience as seeds of unconscious habit and, returning them constantly but often chaotically to the surface consciousness, missioning upwards much futile or perilous stuff of which the origin is obscure to us..." (The Life Divine, p. 559)
Here are some Savitri verses concerning the Subconscient:
(1)"The little deities of Time's nether act
Who work remote from Heaven's controlling eye"
(151)
(2)"Against the sword of Flame, the luminous Eye,
Bastioned they live in massive forts of gloom" (226)
(3)"Aroused from the darkness where they crouched in
the depths,
Prisoned from the sight, they can be held no more"
(4)"A whisper lures to evil the human heart,
It seals up wisdom's eyes, the soul's regard" (448)
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9. Sight in the Intraconscient Subliminal: Inner Sight:
The intraconscient represents the subliminal part of our existence, the large luminous realm of interior consciousness, that corresponds to the subtler life-plane and mind-plane and even subtle physical plane of our being. Indeed, behind our outer existence, our outer mind and life and body,
"Our larger being sits behind cryptic walls:
There are greatnesses hidden in our unseen parts
That wait their hour to step into life's front...
Our inner mind dwells in a larger light,
Its brightness looks at us through hidden doors...
A mighty life-self with its inner powers
Supports the dwarfish modicum we call life...
Our body's subtle self is throned within
In its viewless palace of veridical dreams..." (484, 485)
Thus, the subliminal reach of our being comprises our inner existence. It is the realm of subtle supraphysical experiences and visions and heavenly intimations, a veritable world of wonderful illuminations, and it is in this realm that our mind and vital being retire when they manage to withdraw by inward-drawn concentration from their absorption in surface activities.
Here are some verses from Savitri describing the nature of the inner awakening and what happens when the inner sight opens:
(1)"... when our sight is turned within,
Earth's ignorant veil is lifted from our eyes" (47)
(2)"(Saw] in still lucidities of sight's inner world"
(412)
(3)"Plunging her deep regard into herself (538)
(4)"Opened the windows of the inner sight" (28)
(5)"Lived on the tablets of my inner sight" (405)
(6)"Upon an inner vision's motionless verge" (360)
(7)"Plunged into an inner seeing Mind" (407)
(8)"With the arrow-point of being's inmost gaze"
(438)
(9)"Her inner gaze [beheld] the movements of the
soul" (416)
(10)"Through an inner seeing and sense a wakening
came" (404)
(11)"Where all is deep and strange to the eyes that see"
(64)
(12)"And passes over the edge of mortal sight
To a new vision of himself and things." (71)
(13)"And Fate revealed a chain of seeing will" (76)
(14)"He looked into the unseen with seeing eyes"
(423)
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10. The Intermediate Sight:
Its Lures and Risks:
We have been speaking about the visional experiences of the inner realm of consciousness but we should not forget
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that this field of vision is a mixed world and there is in it not only truth but much half-truth and error. For the rash and unwary sadhaka to enter into it without sufficient preparation and wise guidance may bring much confusion, misleading inspirations and false lights and voices. Sri Aurobindo has sounded a note of serious warning against these alluring but often dangerously misleading visions and experiences in his writing "The Intermediate Zone" (Letters on Yoga, pp. 1039-46), also in The Life Divine (p. 905). Here is a passage from his The Synthesis of Yoga dealing with the same topic:
"The seeker of spiritual perfection has to pass as quickly as possible, if he cannot altogether avoid, this zone of danger, and the safe rule here is to be attached to none of these things, but to make spiritual progress one's sole real objective, and to put no sure confidence in other things until the mind and life and soul are purified and the light of the spirit and Supermind or at least of the spiritually illumined mind and soul are shed on these inner ranges of experience." (pp. 843-44)
We reproduce below a few of the verses from Savitri which graphically describe the sight in this dark zone of experiences, also indicate how to avoid its lure:
(1)"Whose very gaze was a calamity" (205)
(2)"Alluring lips and eyes" (205)
(3)"fascinating eyes" (214)
(4)"Laughing with the eyes of truth" (207)
(5)"With evil eyes for lamps" (221)
(6)"a look of [deceptive] light" (215)
(7)"Forcing reluctant lids assailed the sight" (214)
(8)"A mob of visions broke across the sight,
A jostled sequence lacking sense and suite" (490)
(9)"Or harboured the demoniac in their gaze." (625)
A few antidotes:
(1)"Casting a javelin regard in front" (211)
(2)"The calm and sovereign eyes of thought" (214)
(3)"Eye could not see but only the soul feel." (211)
(4)"Warned by the spirit's inward eye" (215)
(5)"Then peace returned and the soul's sovereign
gaze" (219)
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11. Sight in the Circumconscient:
We have so far spoken about the Inconscient and the Subconscient reaches of our being into which we may penetrate by a downward plunge of our consciousness. We have also referred to the subliminal Intraconscient which can be made accessible by the deepening and inwardization of the consciousness. Now we come to another range, the Circumconscient or the environmental, which can be explored by the progressive widening of the consciousness. It is in this now secret circumconscient that are determined our unseen connections with the world outside us. Currents are constantly pouring upon us from the universal Mind, universal Life, even the universal subtler Matter-field through this enveloping circumconscient consciousness. An uninterrupted widening of our consciousness may finally
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lead us to the acquisition of what is called 'cosmic consciousness'. Here is a relevant passage from Sri Aurobindo's The Life Divine:
"The subliminal has besides a formation of consciousness which projects itself beyond ... and forms a circumconscient, an environing part of itself, through which it receives the contacts of the world and can become aware of them and deal with them before they enter. The subliminal is able to widen indefinitely this circumconscient envelope and more and more enlarge its self-projection into the cosmic existence around it. A point comes where it can break through the separation altogether, unite, identify itself with cosmic being, feel itself universal, one with all existence." (p. 541)
Now, as usual, we append below some illustrative verses from Sri Aurobindo's Savitri:
(1)"The conscious ends of being went rolling back:
The landmarks of the little person fell,
The island ego joined its continent..." (25)
(2)"As so he grew into his larger self (26)
(3)"In beings it knew what lurked to them unknown;
It seized the idea in mind, the wish in the heart;
It plucked out from grey folds of secrecy
The motives which from their own sight men hide.
He felt the beating life in other men
Invading him with their happiness and their grief;
Their love, their anger, their unspoken hopes
Entered in currents or in pouring waves
Into the immobile ocean of his calm.
He heard the inspired sound of his own thoughts
Re-echoed in the vault of other minds;
The world's thought-streams travelled into his ken;
His inner self grew near to others' selves" (26-27)
(4)"The mind leaned out to meet the hidden worlds
And glowed and teemed with marvellous shapes
and hues" (29)
(5)"Ever his consciousness and vision grew;
They took an ampler sweep, a loftier flight" (31)
(6)"A new world-knowledge broadened from within"
(44)
(7)"He grew one with a covert universe....
Forms he descried our mortal eyes see not.
His wide eyes bodied viewless entities,
He saw the cosmic forces at their work
And felt the occult impulse behind man's will."
(8)"Through an inner seeing and sense a wakening
came." (404)
(9)"All things the eye had caught in coloured lines
Were seen anew ...
And in the shape it sought to seize the soul." (404)
(10) "I glimpsed the presence of the One in all." (405)
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12. Sight in the Waking State:
We now come to the waking consciousness, the habitual consciousness of most men, which the subliminal and the subconscient have thrown up on the surface, just a wave of their secret surge.
The normal man's waking consciousness is a limping
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surface consciousness shut up in the body's limitation and within the confines of the little bit of personal mind. One is ordinarily aware only of his surface self and quite ignorant of all that functions behind the veil. "And yet what is on the surface, what we know or think we know of ourselves and even believe that that is all we are, is only a small part of our being," and by far the immensely larger part lies hidden "behind the frontal consciousness, behind the veil, occult and known only by an occult knowledge." (Sri Aurobindo, Letters on Yoga, p. 348)
While dwelling in this normal waking consciousness, a man becomes externalised and gazes outward and rarely if ever inward. No true spiritual life or any higher or deeper realisation becomes possible if one remains fettered to this waking state.
Now what is germane to our main theme of discussion is the interesting fact that every individual human being even in his ordinary waking existence is not composed of one but of many strands of consciousness and each of these strands has the possibility of having a characteristic sight of its own. The intellect, the will, the sense-mind, the desire-self, the heart, even the body-consciousness, all "see" in different ways. All these and other similar parts of the being are "like fields into which forces from the same planes of consciousness in the universal Nature are constantly entering or passing." (Sri Aurobindo, Letters on Yoga, p. 947) Our mind and life and physical consciousness with all their complex sub-levels can each in its own way become aware of all that is there or happening in their corresponding domains and transcribe their awareness in the form of suitable visions. In the words of the Mother:
"... there are many different planes in which you can see. There is a mental seeing, a vital seeing, and there are some visions that are seen in a plane very close to the most material." (CWM, Vol. 3, p. 13)
However that may be, we now proceed to select some verses from Savitri characterising the sights of different parts of the waking consciousness of the majority of men, starting with his material body and culminating in Reason, the highest faculty, passing through the different rungs such as "little life", "greater life", "heart", "physical mind", "little mind", "greater mind", "intellect", "thought", etc. Here are a few verses in each case:
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(a) Matter's Sight:
(1)"Out of the inconscient and subliminal
Arisen, we live in mind's uncertain light
And strive to know and master a dubious world
Whose purpose and meaning are hidden from our
sight." (484)
(2)"But this is only Matter's first self-view" (484)
(3)"Limited ... now by the dull body's sight" (372)
(4)"A lump of Matter, a house of closed sight" (488)
(5)"And Matter hides the soul from its own sight"
(702)
(6)"God wrapped his head from sight in Matter's
cowl" (621)
(7)"A miracle structure of the eternal Mage,
Matter its mystery hides from its own eyes" (623)
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(b)Sight in "Little Life":
(1)"Arriving with heavy eyes that hardly see" (139)
(2)"An eyeless Power that sees no more its aim" (133)
(3)"The upward look was alien to her sight" (136)
(4)"Fixed not his inward eye upon himself (143)
(5)"None thought to look beyond the hour's gains"
(145)
(6)"A half-awakened Nescience struggled there
To know by sight and touch the outside of things."
(7)"He peered across its scanty fringe of sight" (151)
(8)"Time has he none to turn his eyes within
And look for his lost self and his dead soul." (165)
(9)"... it tied the thought to visible things" (148)
(c)Sight in "Greater Life":
(1)"There was an ardour in the gaze of life
That saw heaven blue in the grey air of Night" (493)
(2)"Pale dreams grew real to the dreamer's eyes" (175)
(3)"Tied to some immediate sight and will" (188)
(4)"The magnificent wrappings...
That fold her desirable body out of sight" (189)
(5)"Life's visage hides life's real self from sight" (192)
(6)"Her action imprisons its immortal gaze" (196)
(d)Sight in the Ordinary Heart:
(1)"Our heart's sight is too blind and passionate" (161)
(2)"The seeker's sight receding from his heart" (452)
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(e)Imagination's Sight:
(1)"The dreaming deities look beyond the seen" (601)
(2)"A joy of light, a joy of sudden sight" (38)
(f)Sight in the "Physical Mind":
(1)"That strange observing Power imposed its sight.
It forced on flux a limit and a shape,
It gave its stream a lower narrow bank" (148)
(2)"It had no inward look, no upward gaze" (149)
(g)Sight in "Little Mind":
(1)"All she conceives in hazardous jets of sight" (244)
(2)"Absorbed and cabined in external sight" (245)
(3)"External fact it figures as sole truth,
Wisdom identifies with the earthward look" (246)
(4)"Error discouraged not its confident view" (248)
(5)"Unguided by reason or the seeing soul" (248)
(6)"The eye that looks at the dark half of truth" (192)
(7)"None had the inner look which sees Truth's whole"
(242)
(8)"Displaced the spirit's finer view of things" (242)
(9)"Its morning rays illume our twilight's eyes" (243)
(h)Sight in "Greater Mind":
(1)"A seeking Mind replaced the seeing Soul" (223)
(2)"They erected absolute walls of thought and speech
And made a vacuum to hold the One.
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In their sight they drove towards an empty peak"
(273)
(3)"By an abstract purity of godless sight,
By a percept nude, intolerant of forms,
They brought to Mind what Mind could never reach
And hoped to conquer Truth's supernal base."
(272-273)
(4)"They seized and held by their precisian eye" (266)
(i) Sight of Mental Reason:
Reason is the highest faculty available to normal man. But in the matter of its search and holding of the true truth of things, it suffers from many basic disabilities:
(i)It proceeds with labour from ignorance to truth.
(ii)It starts with appearances and never loses at least a partial dependence on them. It tries to show the truth in the light of the appearances.
(iii)Reason proceeds to conclusion with the crutch of inferences: it can never give us the direct vision of the truth.
(iv)The knowledge offered by the intellect and reason is always a mere "acquisition" and hence there hangs around it even in the best of circumstances a certain shadow of doubt and uncertainty.
(v)The mental reason cannot see the totality at all and hence does not know fully any whole.
(vi)The reason deals not with any thing in itself, its reality or its essence but only with its constituents, processes and properties.
(vii)Reason deals with the finite and is helpless before the infinite.
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All these and other related deficiencies render the sight of mental reason altogether fallible. Here are some illustrative verses from Savitri emphasising the penury of reason's vision:
(1)"... a pensive face and close peering eyes" (249)
(2)"... a rigorous stare in her creative eyes" (250)
(3)"She travels on the roads of erring sight" (252)
(4)"This constant change spells progress to her eyes "
(251)
(5)"Its highest, widest seeing was a half-search" (256)
(6)"Reason cannot tear off that glimmering mask,
Her efforts only make it glimmer more;
In packets she ties up the indivisible" (257)
(7)"... whose confident sight
A bounded prospect took for the far goal." (257)
(8)"... the great truths escape her narrow cast;
Guarded from vision by creation's depths" (626)
Although man the mental being prides himself on the possession of mind, and his "seeing thoughts" fill in "the blanks left by the seeking sense" (268), it remains a patent fact that mind, the intellect and the reason of man cannot grasp "the naked body of the Truth" (517): they are for ever "baffled by her endless garbs" (517). There is always a limit to the capacity of mind's vision.
(j) Limit of Mind's Sight:
(1) "That which moves all is hidden from his gaze"
(517)
(2)"His poring eyes miss the unseen behind" (517)
(3)"Sight retiring behind the walls of thought" (457)
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13. Sight in the Superconscient:
(A) Introduction:
We have just now referred to the insufficiency of the normal mind of man to be an instrument for the discovery of the Truth:
"Our mind lives far off from the authentic Light
Catching at little fragments of the truth..." (161)
But if mind fails, what else remains? Again, it has been affirmed that "thought nor word can seize eternal Truth". (276) But, then, if thought proves its impotence, what else can take its place? The answer is: What else? It must be a sight:
"Out of our thoughts we must leap up to sight..." (276) Yes, it has to be a sight but surely not the sight of mind: it must be a far greater sight:
"His being stretched beyond the sight of thought."
(260)
So we have to advance farther into the domains of the spirit, acquire the Spirit's sight and become a Kavi, Rishi, or Seer:
"The veil is torn, the thinker is no more:
Only the spirit sees and all is known." (571)
Now this Spirit's vision can be had only in the Superconscient. But what is this superconscient? Well, all that we have said so far in this essay as regards the total constitution of our being, viz., the Inconscient, the Subconscient, the subliminal Intraconscient, the subliminal Circumconscient,
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and the Waking State, does not suffice to give a full account of what we really are. For there is a range of being and consciousness far transcending all these elements of our constitution, which is super-conscient to all the other provinces of our existence:
"Out of the inconscient and the subliminal
Arisen, we live in mind's uncertain light...
Above us dwells a superconscient god
Hidden in the mystery of his own light..." (484)
So we now proceed to the delineation of the nature of sight in those superconscient regions of our being.
If and when we pierce the veil of our limiting mind-consciousness and enter into the superconscient field, we find there various worlds of cosmic existence: there are too, be it noted, various corresponding planes of our subjective consciousness. Here is a passage from Sri Aurobindo's The Synthesis of Yoga which throws light on the point we have been discussing:
"... they are as if a ladder plunging down into Matter and perhaps below it, rising up into the heights of the Spirit, even perhaps to the point at which existence escapes out of cosmic being into ranges of a supra-cosmic Absolute..." (p. 438)
It is worth quoting in this connection a passage from Sri Aurobindo's The Life Divine which makes clear to us the constitution of the superconscient realm:
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"... from the point of view of the ascent of consciousness from our mind upwards through a rising series of dynamic powers by which it can sublimate itself, the gradation 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 sight of the sadhaka undergoes a progressive transformation as it mounts the ladder of the four-rung "spiritual Mind" series. We now intend to describe in brief outline the nature of the 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 than ours,
A consciousness of brighter fields and skies,
Of beings less circumscribed than brief-lived men
And subtler bodies than these passing frames,
Objects too fine for our material grasp,
Acts vibrant with a superhuman light..." (28)
(B) Sight in the Spiritual Mind Planes:
To recapitulate: once we cross the confines of the normal mind of man, we meet on our ascending climb a series of
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hierarchised luminous planes of consciousness serving as links and bridges between the now normal waking mind of non-spiritual humanity and the native heights of our spiritual 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, this last being the plane of absolute and everlasting Light, that transcends altogether the aparārdha or the lower hemisphere of existence. Here are some Savitri verses referring to these supernal planes:
(1)"He raised his eyes to unseen spiritual heights" (76)
(2)"A vision lightened on the viewless heights" (42)
(3)"On summit Mind are radiant 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 nature of Truth-Thought. Its most characteristic movement is a mass-ideation, a totality of truth-seeing at a single view. The relation of idea with idea, of truth with truth is not established by logic but emerges already self-seen in the integral whole. Thought in 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
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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:
(1)"There Mind, a splendid sun of vision's rays,
Shaped substance by the glory of its thoughts"
(327)
(2)"Ideal rotated symphonies of sight" (301)
(3)"The immortal's thoughts displaced our bounded
view" (529)
(4)"Illumined by a vision in the thought" (176)
(5)"A cosmic Thought spreads out its vastitudes" (659)
(B.2) Sight in the Illumined Mind:
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 expressive of sight.
Now some illustrative verses from Sri Aurobindo's Savitri'.
(1)"An empyrean vision saw and knew" (25)
(2)"Whence it shoots the arrows of his sight and will"
(529)
(3)"Whose fire bums in the eyes of seer and sage;
A lightning flash of visionary sight" (627)
(4)"There dwelling all becomes a blaze of sight;
A burning head of vision leads the mind,
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Thought trails behind it its long comet tail;
The heart glows, an illuminate and seer" (660)
(B.3) Sight in the Intuitive Mind:
Next in the order of ascension is the Intuitive Mind whose characteristic power is an intimate and exact truth-perception which arises out of a revealing encounter between the subject and the object, carrying in it as its natural consequence a truth-sight and truth-conception. Thought in the Intuitive Mind is revelatory in character.
Here are some verses from Savitri indicating how sight functions in this Intuitive Mind plane:
(1)"Sight's lightnings leapt into the invisible" (31)
(2)"Nothing escaped his vast intuitive sight" (96)
(3)"Intuition's lightnings range in a bright pack
Hunting all hidden truths out of their lairs" (660)
(4)"Its fiery edge of seeing absolute
Cleaves into locked unknown retreats of self,...
Thought there has revelation's sun-bright eyes..."
(660)
(B.4) Sight in the Overmind:
Beyond the plane of the Intuitive Mind is a superconscient cosmic Mind which possesses a power of cosmic consciousness, a principle of global knowledge. In the wide cosmic perception of the Overmind,
"Ideas are phalanxed like a group of sums;
Thought crowds in masses seized by one regard;
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All Time is one body, Space a single book:
There is the Godhead's universal gaze
And there the boundaries of immortal Mind..." (660)
In the Overmind "all inner individual sight or intelligence of things is now a revelation or illumination of what is seen or comprehended, but the source of the revelation is not in one's separate self but in the universal knowledge..." {The Life Divine, p. 950)
Here are some verses from Savitri characterising the sight in the Overmind:
(1)"His boundless thought was neighbour to cosmic
sight:
A universal light was in his eyes" (79)
(2)"... eyes of boundless thoughts" (335)
(3)"All came at once in his single view" (96)
(4)"It enveloped all Nature in a single glance" (26)
(5)"It was sight and thought in one all-seeing Mind"
(555)
(6)"Mind was a single immeasurable look" (556)
(7)"The stretch and blaze of cosmic sight" (661)
(8)"A cosmic vision, a spiritual sense
Feels all the Infinite lodged in finite form" (662)
Sight of the Overmental Gods:
(1)"Immobile, seeing the milleniums pass" (57)
(2)"They look on our struggle with impartial eyes" (57)
(3)"The gods who watch the earth with sleepless eyes"
(587)
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(4)"Unmoved their timeless wide unchanging gaze"
(574)
(5)"And look impassive on a suffering world,
Calm they gaze down on the little human scene"
(428)
(B.5) Spiritual Sight:
We have been discussing the nature of sight and vision in the superconscient Higher Mind, Illumined Mind, Intuitive Mind and Overmind levels of consciousness. Now all these sights are called "spiritual sights". Here a vague question may perhaps trouble the mind of some readers: Why are we taking care to term the cognitions in the superconscient planes as "sights" and not purely and simply as "knowledge"? The question needs some clarifying answer at this point. Sri Aurobindo himself has discussed this specific point at many places in The Life Divine, The Synthesis of Yoga, Letters on Yoga, also in Vol. 17 of his Collected Works. We give below the summary of his observations:
A mental figure or conception is not what is called a "realisation" or a "seeing". It is no better than an indirect knowledge, paroksa. What is needed is a direct vision of the truth without the need of observation of the object, reasoning, evidence, imagination, memory or any other of the usual faculties of intellect. Now the spiritual vision, drsti, is a sort of light in the soul by which things unseen become as evident and real to it as do things physically seen to the physical eye. "It is only when after long and persistent concentration or by other means the veil of the mind is rent or swept aside, only when a flood of light breaks over the awakened mentality,... and conception gives place to a
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knowledge-vision in which the Self is as present, real, concrete as a physical object to the physical eye, that we possess in knowledge; for we have seen." (The Synthesis of Yoga, p. 291) (italics author's)
This sight or drsti is to the spirit what the eyes are to the physical mind and, Sri Aurobindo emphasises, "one has the sense of having passed through a subtly analogous process." (Ibid., p. 803)
The ancient sages of India highly valued this power of internal spiritual vision; for only this can make a man a Rishi or a Kavi, a Seer, and no longer a mere thinker.
We quote here certain verses from Savitri which bring out in clear outline the nature of the (i) "Seer's sight", (ii) "spiritual sight", and the (iii) "Spirit's sight".
Seer's Sight:
(1)"My mind transfigures to a rapturous seer" (408)
(2)"A Seer was bom, a shining guest of Time" (25)
(3)"It looked into the very self of things;
Deceived no more by form he saw the soul." (26)
(4)"Transmitting gave to prophet and to seer
The inspired body of the mystic truth." (39)
(5)"... a mystic seer
Through vision looks at the invisible" (398)
(6)"A seer, he has entered the forbidden realms...
Armed with the golden speech, the diamond eye"
(681)
Spiritual Sight:
(1) "It needs the power of a spiritual gaze" (49)
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(2) "... forced
The carved thought-shrouded doors to swing apart,
Unlocked the avenues of spiritual sight" (683)
(3)"Unsealed was Nature's great spiritual eye" (382)
(4)"His sight, spiritual in embodying orbs,
Could pierce through the grey phosphorescent haze
And scan the secrets of the shifting flux" (138)
(5)"...immediacy of errorless sight" (267)
(6)"Its vision of some stupendous All" (298)
(7)"A gaze of the Alone from every face" (35)
(8)"Her eyes were turned towards the eternal source"
(501)
(9)"Now to the limitless gaze disclosed that sees
Things barred from human thinking's earthly lids"
(572)
(10)"Thence gazing with an immeasurable outlook
One with self's inlook..." (298)
(11)"His knowledge an in view caught unfathomable,
An outview by no brief horizons cut" (301)
Spirit's Sight:
(1)"The Unseen's eye that looks at the unseen" (665)
(2)"... the spirit's vision can descry
[not] dimmed by the imperfection of its means"
(256, 257)
(3)"Mystic, ineffable is the Spirit's truth,
Unspoken, caught only by the spirit's eye." (272)
(4)"... the silent Being within
Who sees life's drama pass with unmoved eyes"
(470)
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Part Three
Vision in the "Higher Hemisphere"
1. Beyond the Reach of Sight:
The central theme of our essay has been the study of the itinerary of the ascent of sight. Following this course we have travelled from the "sightless sight" of the Inconscient up to the "cosmic gaze" of the Overmind. But all these belong to what was called by the ancient Indian mystics the "Lower Hemisphere" of our existence. But the reach of the Reality far transcends the borders of this Overmind zone of consciousness.
Now, there are three unified principles of the Divine, viz., the Existence principle (Sat), the Consciousness-Force principle (Chit-Shakti) and the Bliss principle (Ananda), and finally a fourth principle, Supermind (Mahas or Vijnana). These four supernal principles constitute the "Higher Hemisphere" of our being. Now the question is: can sight travel to this Higher Hemisphere, or, it has to stop at the upper border of the Overmind? Already the Rishi of the Isha Upanishad complained that the golden Overmind was blocking his vision from advancing farther upward. In fact, this Overmind links the lower hemisphere of Knowledge-Ignorance with the supramental Gnosis or Truth-Consciousness, but at the same time veils from our sight the greater Truth of the Supermind. The cosmic Vision of this overmental plane of consciousness, proceeding luminously from the truth, constitutes the "golden lid covering the face of the truth" (hiranmayena pātrena satyasyāpihitam
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mukham). (Isha Upanishad, 15) In order to seize the truth in its unalloyed and unmitigated Glory, we have to make a last supreme ascent in the climb of our spiritual consciousness and break through the shining shield of Overmind into the realm of the supramental Gnosis. But will our power of sight be able to follow the climb of our consciousness into the four-rung zone of the higher hemispehre? Apparently not. Our "mortal" sight which has functioned in different ways on all the levels up to the Overmind abruptly avows its impotence and bows out. Conclusion: All that is above and beyond may be an object of knowledge bur surely not of vision. This is apparently supported by the following verses of Savitri:
(1)"Veiled by the Ray no mortal eye can bear" (57)
(2)"Thought and sight can never know" (97)
(3)"But what That was no thought or sight could tell"
(308)
(4)"Beyond the sight, the last support of form" (320)
(5)"An Omniscient knowing without thought or sight"
(81)
But for sight the situation may not be so hopeless as that. For already the Vedic seers indicated that in the Supermind of the higher hemisphere one does not see the truth "by reflection in a mental organ of vision, but with the Sun of gnosis itself as his eye..." (Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis of Yoga, p. 462)
So, can it be that sight itself will undergo a supreme transformation and appear in another essence in the divine world? The following passage from one of Sri Aurobindo's
letters leads us to believe that the answer may indeed be a 'yes':
"The supermind is an entirely different consciousness not only from the spiritualised Mind, but from the planes above spiritualised Mind which intervene between it and the supramental plane. Once one passes beyond overmind to supermind, one enters into a consciousness to which the norms of the other planes do not at all apply and in which the same truth, e.g. Sachchidananda and truth of this universe, is seen in quite a different way and has a different dynamic consequence." (Letters on Yoga, pp. 240-41)
So there can possibly be a "supramental sight" in the higher hemisphere far beyond the overmental zone which represents the last rung of the lower hemisphere and closes the series in the ignorance. But before we come to the characterisation of this supramental sight, it would be better for our. appreciation if we indicate a little more fully what the two hemispheres of existence actually signify.
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2. Hemispheres of Existence:
Our total being has a higher and a lower hemisphere of functioning, the aparārdha and the aparārdha of the ancient mystic Wisdom. There is a separation between these two hemispheres, very much acute in practice although unreal in essence.
In reality, the origin, the continent, the initial and the ultimate truth of all that exists anywhere in the universe is the triune principle of Sachchidananda: it is a transcendent
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and infinite and absolute Existence-Consciousness-Bliss which is the very nature of the divine Being.
Thus Sachchidananda is the One with a triple aspect functioning differently in three statuses.
In the Supreme the three are not three but one. Existence, Consciousness and Bliss are there not only inseparable but so much each other that they are not distinct at all.
In the superior planes of manifestation in the higher hemisphere they become triune; that is to say, although they remain inseparable, one aspect can make itself more prominent and base or lead the others.
In the lower planes below in the lower hemisphere, they become separable and even separate in appearance, though not in their secret reality.
The Sachchidananda can be experienced in either of its two aspects, static and dynamic. But "the full dynamic truth of Sachchidananda and the universe and its consequence cannot be grasped by any other consciousness than the supermind..." {Letters on Yoga, p. 241)
Sachchidananda contains all in a passive transcendent consciousness but becomes, sustains and governs everything by an active constituting consciousness.
The higher hemisphere is the realm of the Spirit's perfect and eternal reign. There it manifests its infinities, the unconcealed glories of its illimitable existence (Sat), its illimitable consciousness and knowledge (Chit), its illimitable force and power (Shakti) and its illimitable beatitude (Ananda).
The creative action of Sachchidananda, of the Existence-Consciousness-Bliss Absolute, has its centre in a fourth medial principle called Supermind (Mahas or Vijnana).
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Thus supermind is between the Sachchidananda and the lower creation. It alone contains the self-determining Truth of the Divine Consciousness and is necessary for a truth-creation.
Supermind is Sachchidananda "... power of self-awareness and world-awareness, the world being known as within itself and not outside. [It is] the Truth-Consciousness whether above or in the universe by which the Divine knows not only his own essence and being but his manifestation also. Its fundamental character is knowledge by identity, by that the Self is known, the Divine Sachchidananda is known, but also the truth of manifestation is known, because this too is That..." (Letters on Yoga, pp. 242-43)
Thus the supermind is the divine Gnosis which creates, governs and upholds the worlds. And it is the supramental power that can transform mind, life and body - not the Sachchidananda consciousness which supports impartially everything.
Mind, Life and Matter which constitute the lower hemisphere of existence are a triple aspect of the higher principles of the upper hemisphere but working here in subjection to the principle of Ignorance, and in apparent self-forgetfulness of the Divine One in his play of division and multiplicity.
The lower being begins where a veil falls between spirit in supermind and spirit in mind, life and body. (Note: this whole section "Hemispheres of Existence" is a free adaptation of various passages from Sri Aurobindo's The Life Divine, The Synthesis of Yoga and Letters on Yoga.)
Here are just a few verses from Savitri referring to this
divine Gnosis, the Supermind:
(1)"Now Mind is all and its uncertain ray,
Mind is the leader of the body and life,
Mind the thought-driven chariot of the soul...
Mind is not all his tireless climb can reach,
There is a fire on the apex of the worlds,
There is a house of the Eternal's Light,
There is an infinite truth, an absolute power....
Ihere is a consciousness mind cannot touch,
Its speech cannot utter nor its thought reveal.
It has no home on earth, no centre in man,
Yet is the source of all things thought and done,
The fount of the creation and its works.
It is the originer of all truth here..." (704-05)
(2)"There is a world of everlasting Light,
In the realms of the immortal Supermind
Truth who hides here her head in mystery,
Her riddle deemed by reason impossible
In the stark structure of material form,
Unenigmaed lives, unmasked her face and there
Is Nature and the common law of things." (661-62)
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3. Supramental Sight:
Knowledge by identity between the subject and the object, between the seer and the seen, is the basic attribute of the supramental gnosis but this supramental knowledge or experience by identity carries in it as a secondary part of itself a supramental vision. This vision can come even
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before there is any identity, as a sort of emanation of light from this secret underlying unity. This vision may at times be detached from the identity as a separate power. The truth or the thing known is then felt as an object subjectively seen in the self.
The supramental eye can see a hundred converging and diverging motions in one glance. It can envelope in its harmonising vision all that seem to our fragmenting mind nothing but clash and opposition and the collision and strife of numberless contending truths and forces.
Truth to the supramental sight is at the same time single and infinite and the complexities of its play in time and space bring out with an abundant facility the rich significances of the Eternal's many-sided oneness.
The supramental gnosis starts from the truth and shows the appearances in the light of the truth. It sees the thing in itself first, penetrates to its original and eternal essence and nature, and places its processes and properties only as a self-expression of this fundamental nature. Thus the supramental vision would see not merely the thing but all its truths, forces and powers and all the eternities within it.
The supramental gnosis has the direct contact, the im-iwediate vision and the undiluted possession of the truth and has no need of seeking or any kind of procedure. The conclusion, if any, would be seen at once in its own right, by its own self-sufficient witness. All the so-called evidence would be seen too at once, along with it, in the same comprehensive figure, not at all as its "evidence" but as its inseparable "wings of circumstance".
The supramental gnosis dwells in the unity and knows by it all the very various diversities. These diversities are to it
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not diversities making up a constructed unity but a unity constituting its own multitudes.
The supramental gnosis lives in the infinite and views finite things only in their relation to the infinite and in the sense of the infinite and never as something divorced and different from the infinite.
Finally the supramental gnosis dominates time in one view and links past, present and future in a single continuous map of knowledge and in an unpartitioned time-vision. (Note: This introductory section on "supramental sight" is adapted from various passages of Sri Aurobindo's writings.)
Now, as usual, we quote below some illustrative verses from Savitri showing the character of supramental sight:
(1)"Above the stretch and blaze of cosmic Sight'' (661)
(2)"A universal vision that unites" (325)
" (3) "All was uncovered to his sealless eye." (83)
(4)"Spirit no more is hid from its own view" (298)
(5)"A single and infallible look comes down" (27)
(6)"A wide tower of vision whence all could be seen
And all was centred in a single view" (514)
(7)"He is the vision and he is the seer" (61)
(8)"A kindling rapture joins the seer and seen" (112)
(9)"Sight was a flame-throw from identity" (301)
(10)"This seeing was identical with the seen" (546)
(11)"A plan in the occult eternal Mind
Mapped out to backward and prophetic sight"
(342)
(12)"The long flow of its manifesting course,
Was held in spirit's single wide regard." (299)
(13) "Bare in that Light Time toiled, his unseen works
Detected, the broad-flung far-seeing schemes
Unfinished which his aeoned flight unrolls
Were mapped already in that world-wide look"
(442)
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4. Divine's Self-Vision:
The ascending march of sight continues even beyond the supramental gnosis and arrives at the point where the cosmic manifestation has not yet begun and the static Sachchidananda is still absorbed in himself. What is the nature of sight there?
By adapting what Sri Aurobindo has said in his commentary on the Isha Upanishad we may venture to say that we arrive, in the status of non-manifestation, at the light of the supreme superconscient in which even the intuitive knowledge of the truth of things based upon the total and integral vision — so characteristic of the supramental sight - passes into self-luminous self-vision of the one Existent. This status of sight is referred to by the following verses from Sri Aurobindo's Savitri:
(1)"Inspired by silence and the closed eyes' sight" (36)
(2)"Watched by closed eyes, mute faces of the Un-
born" (80)
(3)"All light is but a flash from his closed eyes"
(4)"The eyes with their closed lids that see all things"
(41)
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We remember here that significant utterance of the Katha Upanishad: "For all that is bright is but the shadow of His brightness and by His shining all this shines." (Sri Aurobindo's translation of the Upanishadic verse: tameva bhāntam anubhāti sarvam tasya bhāsā sarvam idam vibhāti.)
Then Sachchidananda "decides" to initiate manifestation and opens his eyes. How does his supreme gaze look like? Let the Savitri verses speak:
(1)"His gaze was the regard of eternity" (682)
(2)"A diamond purity of eternal sight'' (297)
(3)"... the Omniscient's eyes" (691)
Sachchidananda becomes the "sole Seer" {ekarsi, Isha Upanishad); he is the only drastā, "He alone who sees". To cite a telling aphorism of Patanjali: tadā drastur svarupe avasthānam, "The Seer dwells then in His own status." His unblinking Eye shines extended in the heavens: div'iva caksurātatam {Rig-Veda). Here are some relevant Savitri verses:
(1)"A still all-seeing Eye above" (493)
(2)"And intolerant flames the lone all-witnessing Eye"
(343)
(3)"The movement watched by an unsleeping Eye"
(509)
(4)"... in the vigil of a deathless gaze" (99)
(5)"And guards the world with its all-seeing gaze"
(317)
(6)"An Eye immense regarding all things done" (322)
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5.Divine's Cosmic Vision:
The manifestation begins; the worlds are created. The passive Sachchidananda is now in his role of all-watching, all-governing Cosmic Purusha. To quote Sri Aurobindo: "The Brahman-consciousness [in this case]... is not the Absolute withdrawn into itself, but that Absolute in its outlook on the relative; it is the Lord, the Master-Soul, the governing Transcendent and All..." (SABCL, Vol. 12, p. 198) He is the samam Brahma, "the Brahman with unbounded equal vision" of the Gita. Here are some Savitri verses which strikingly bring out this impartial all-governing vision of the Divine in his dealing with the cosmos:
(1)"Heaven's fixed regard beholds him from above"
(336)
(2)"Impartial fell its gaze on evil and good" (283)
(3)"All things he sees with calm indifferent gaze"
(646)
(4)"He is the one infinite Person seeing this world"
(656)
(5)"... Cosmic Being at his task" (416)
(6)"Calm eyes divine regard the human scene" (482)
(7)"A wide unshaken look at Time's unrest" (36)
(8)"Outspread beneath some large indifferent gaze,
Impartial witness to our joy and bale" (5)
6.The Vision of the One in the Many:
This one is a vision every Sadhaka on the Integral Path aspires after and seeks to acquire as the sure and secure
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point d'appui in the ups and downs of his long tortuous journey of Yoga. Indeed, the progressive elevation and enlargement of the divided and limited egoistic sight will lead the sadhaka to a harmonising vision of the One in All and of All in the One. The Sadhaka is then able to see that all becoming without exception, irrespective of the plane in which it manifests, is bom in the Being of Sachchidananda who himself, of course, transcends all becomings and is always their Lord, Prajapati. Here is a passage from The Synthesis of Yoga where Sri Aurobindo speaks of the capital importance of this momentous vision of the One in All:
"The one secure and all-reconciling truth which is the very foundation of the universe is this that life is the manifestation of an uncreated Self and Spirit, and the key to life's hidden secret is the true relation of this Spirit with its own created existences. There is behind all this life the look of an eternal Being upon its multitudinous becomings; there is around and everywhere in it the envelopment and penetration of a manifestation in time by an unmanifested timeless Eternal." (pp. 106-07)
Here is a passage, rather long, from Sri Aurobindo's Savitri which pin-points in sublime verses the essential character of this vision:
"A cosmic vision, a spiritual sense
Feels all the Infinite lodged in finite form
And seen through a quivering ecstasy of light
Discovers the bright face of the Bodiless.
In the truth of a moment, in the moment's soul
Can sip the honey-wine of Eternity.
A spirit who is no one and innumerable,
The one mystic infinite Person of his world
Multiplies his myriad personality,
On all his bodies seals his divinity's stamp
And sits in each immortal and unique.
The Immobile stands behind each daily act,
A background of the movement and the scene,
Upholding creation on its might and calm
And change on the Immutable's deathless poise.
The Timeless looks out from the travelling hours;
The Ineffable puts on a robe of speech..." (662)
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7. The Vision of the Universal Spirit:
This vision does not limit itself to that of the One in the All; it extends itself to cover the integral perception of the All as the One. This universe in its entirety is the very Supreme Self figured in cosmic existence. The vision of the universal Purusha offers the Sadhaka a concrete living sight, in vivid images, of the visible greatness of the invisible Divine. The Sadhaka can then see the whole world related and unified in the very Body of the Divine. The soul admitted to this awe-inspiring vision beholds all things in one view, not with a divided, partial, and therefore bewildered seeing of the mental consciousness but with the all-embracing and therefore all-reconciling courageous vision of the heroic spirit. For the happy consequence of this vision of the Universal Spirit we may read with interest the following passage from Sri Aurobindo's Essays on the Gita:
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"It is this vision that ... liberates, justifies, explains all that is and was and shall be. Once seen and held it lays the shining axe of God at the root of all doubts and perplexities and annihilates all denials and oppositions. It is the vision that reconciles and unifies. If the soul can arrive at unity with the Godhead in this vision, ... all even that is terrible in the world loses its terror." (p. 364)
Now let us take a joyous dip into some verses of Savitri wherein Sri Aurobindo is describing how the Divine intimately manifests himself through all that is in the cosmos:
"The universe writing its tremendous sense
In the inexhaustible meaning of a word.
In him the architect of the visible world,
At once the art and artist of his works,
Spirit and seer and thinker of things seen,
Virât, who lights his camp-fires in the suns
And the star-entangled ether is his hold,
Expressed himself with Matter for his speech
Objects are his letters, forces are his words,
Events are the crowded history of his life,
And sea and land are the pages of his tale,
Matter is his means and his spiritual sign...
His is the dumb will of atom and of clod;
A Will that without sense or motive acts,
An intelligence needing not to think or plan,
The world creates itself invincibly;
For its body is the body of the Lord
And in its heart stands Virât, King of kings." (680-81)
We now propose to enter the "forbidden land", for we are daring to speak about the vision of the Supreme Form of the supreme Divine. But does the Divine have any form? Is he not arupa or "formless" as the monistic Vedantin would affirm?
But before attempting to discuss these tricky questions it will be better if we first clearly bring out the nature of the evolving relationship between "form" and "sight"; for, that will incidentally throw some light on the question of whether the Supreme possesses a Supreme Form of his own and, if yes, whether this Form can at all be the object of any sight whatsoever.
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8. On Form and Sight:
The very first point we have to note carefully is "that not only are the properties of form, even the most obvious such as colour, light, etc. merely operations of Force, but form itself is only an operation of Force. This Force again proves to be self-power of conscious-being in a state of energy and activity. Practically, therefore, all form is only an operation of consciousness impressing itself with presentations of its own workings." (SABCL, Vol. 12, p. 195)
Thus the form is the last derivative of an action of the consciousness. A momentous implication follows from this basic fact. Supposing there is an object X with its fundamental essential reality unknown and hidden. Now a subject, a viewer, looking at the object X will clothe this X with a form which will vary depending on the level of consciousness the seer employs while seeing the object. We cannot but recall here a very interesting passage of Sri
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Aurobindo so beautifully formulated:
"Of all that we know we know only the outside; even when we imagine that we have intimately seized the innermost thing, we have touched only an inner external. It is still a sheath of the covering, only it is a second or third or even a seventh sheath, [and] not the most outward and visible." (Essays Divine and Human, pp. 197-98)
Thus the forms seen by a particular seer may not be the ordinary vision of man:
(1)"Forms he descried our mortal eyes see not" (44)
(2)"Aware of forms to which our eyes are closed"
(356)
(3)"A sight opened upon the invisible
But forms of whatever subtlety and elevation need not always remain an inseparable accompaniment of vision; shapes need not bind the sight always:
(1)"Into a vision that surpasses forms" (32)
(2)"My vision saw unbounded by her forms" (401)
(3)"Shape the convention bound no more her sight"
(695)
But sight has the inherent tendency to clothe itself with images, images not surely gross and physical in all cases but however subtle and sublime and elevated these images may be, they stand as a bar to the ungarbed vision of the truth. Hence a point is reached when the vision in its aspiration after the bare body of the truth seeks to distance itself from the pursuit of the imaged sight:
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"Here vision fled back from the sight alarmed..." (604)
But even if it is not an "imaged form", some form there must be in every act of vision and sight. Indeed, there are, as we have hinted before, forms and forms of an ever ascending order reaching up to the extreme border of manifestation. For forms are manifestations in Time and Space of something real, not arbitrary inventions out of nothing. Therefore the essentials of form carry always in them secret values and significances of an unseen reality made visible and sensible. In Sri Aurobindo's words, "Form may be said to be the innate body, the inevitable self-revelation of the formless, and this is true not only of external shapes, but of the unseen formations of mind and life which we seize only by our thought and those sensible forms of which only the subtle grasp of the inner consciousness can become aware." (The Life Divine, pp. 337-38)
But still there has to be a limiting finis to this ascending march of vision and therefore of shapes and forms. When one reaches the horizons of manifestation, standing on the dividing line of separation between manifestation and non-manifestation, one seems to discover that sight and form cannot cross the line and one is left with a pure perception alone and if this ends, the whole nāmarupātmakam jagat, the world of names and forms, will vanish into nothingness.
Let us pause for a moment at this critical juncture of the ascension and savour instead the beauty of the description given by Sri Aurobindo in his Savitri:
(1) "His soul abandoned the blind star-field, Space.
Afar from all that makes the measured world,
Plunging to hidden eternities it withdrew
Back from mind's foaming surface to the Vasts
Voiceless within us in omniscient sleep.
Above the imperfect reach of word and thought,
Beyond the sight, the last support of form,
Lost in deep tracts of superconscient Light" (320)
(2)"A pure perception was the only power
That stood behind her action and her sight.
If that retired, all objects would be extinct,
Her private universe would cease to be" (546)
(3)"Yet something was there behind the fading scene;
Wherever she turned, at whatsoever she looked,
It was perceived, yet hid from mind and sight.
The One only real shut itself from Space
And stood aloof from the idea of Time.
Its truth escaped from shape and line and hue.
All else grew unsubstantial, self-annulled,
This only everlasting seemed and true,
Yet nowhere dwelt, it was outside the hours.
This only could justify the labour of sight,
But sight could not define for it a form" (547)
Have we then at last reached the end of the ascent of sight which has been the running theme of our essay? Is there indeed no form, no sight in the transcendent Absolute? Yet it is a fact that Sri Aurobindo speaks at times of "deathless forms", of "forms in the Eternal's gaze" and of "self-born shapes":
(1)"Vision reposed on a safety of deathess forms"
(329)
(2)"Formless Creator and immortal forms" (681)
(3)"... self-bom shapes
That live for ever in the Eternal's gaze." (109)
(4)"He met the forms that divinise the sight'' (235)
So in puzzlement we ask ourselves the question: Is the Absolute Reality absolutely formless? Can there not be a supreme Form of the supreme Divine? A human eye, it is well understood, cannot ever hope to vision this Form but is there not a divine Eye, divya caksu, to which this supreme Form may reveal itself? Our next section will be devoted to the discussion of this point.
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9. Vision of the Supreme Form:
A very difficult question confronts us: Whether the Divine has an original supraphysical Form and power of form from which all other forms proceed, or is eternally formless.
The normal conception of the Infinite Being is formlessness but can he not be at once form and the Formless? For the apparent contradiction does not correspond to a real opposition and incompatibility. For, the Formless is not an utter negation of the power of formation but the condition for the Infinite's free play of formation. The Divine is formless but by that very reason capable of manifesting all possible shapes of being. (Adaptation of page 337 of The Life Divine.)
As Sri Aurobindo has so trenchantly put it in his Essays
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Divine and Human: "Nothing can arise from Nothing. Asat, Nothingness, is a creation of our mind; where it cannot see or conceive, where its object is something beyond its grasp, too much beyond to give even the sense of a vague intangible, then it cries out 'Here there is nothing.' Out of its own incapacity it has created the conception of a Zero. But what in truth is this zero? It is an incalculable Infinite." (p. 197)
But the doubting reader may still raise a valid question here: Granted that the Formless has given rise to all these myriad forms but does it follow from that that the Formless itself has a form of its own? In answer to the misgivings on this score expressed by one of his disciples, Sri Aurobindo once remarked that even if the Formless logically precedes Form, yet it is not illogical to assume that in the Formless itself Form is inherent and already existent in a mystic latency; also it would be equally logical to assume that there is an eternal Form of Krishna, a spirit body. Sri Aurobindo further wrote:
"As for the highest Reality it is no doubt Absolute Existence, but is it only that? Absolute Existence as an abstraction may exclude everything else from itself and amount to a sort of very positive zero; but Absolute Existence as a reality who shall define and say what is or is not in its inconceivable depths, its illimitable Mystery?" (Letters on Yoga, p. 83) (italics author's)
However, leaving aside all metaphysical debate and any misplaced zeal to score a point, which is not after all the purpose of the present essay, let us proceed to the attentive
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reading of a very sublime passage of Sri Aurobindo's Savitri which describes the austere and heroic attempt of the Mahayogi Aswapathy to have a vision of the Ultimate Form, and its spiritual aftermath.
Aswapathy's soul was passing on "towards the end which ever begins again" (295); it was approaching "to the source of all things human and divine". Far beyond the zone of "nameless Gods", even beyond the Abode of Iswara-Iswari, "the deathless Two-in-One", "a single being in two bodies clasped", who "seated absorbed in deep creative joy... sustained the mobile world", at the fount of all
"...One stood
Who brought them forth from the Unknowable.
Ever disguised she awaits the seeking spirit;
Watcher on the supreme unreachable peaks,
Guide of the traveller of the unseen paths,
She guards the austere approach to the Alone....
Above them all she stands supporting all,
The sole omnipotent Goddess ever-veiled
Of whom the world is the inscrutable mask;
The ages are the footfalls of her tread,
Their happenings the figure of her thoughts,
And all creation is her endless act." (295)
What did Aswapathy do then and what followed? -
"Mute in the fathomless passion of his will
He outstretched to her his folded hands of prayer.
Then in a sovereign answer to his heart
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A gesture came as of worlds thrown away,
And from her raiment's lustrous mystery raised
One arm half-parted the eternal veil.
A light appeared still and imperishable.
Attracted to the large and luminous depths
Of the ravishing enigma of her eyes,
He saw the mystic outline of a face." (295-96)
And what was the effect of this vision on Aswapathy? -
"Overwhelmed by her implacable light and bliss,
An atom of her illimitable self
Mastered by the honey and lightning of her power,
Tossed towards the shores of ocean ecstasy,
Drunk with a deep golden spiritual wine,
He cast from the rent stillness of his soul
A cry of adoration and desire
And the surrender of his boundless mind
And the self-giving of his silent heart.
He fell down at her feet unconscious, prone." (296)
"He fell down at her feet unconscious, prone." We may recall in this connection the stem warning uttered by the supreme Lord to Moses so that the latter might not try to go near Him and "see" Him in his original Form. For no consciousness lodged in any material embodiment can ever succeed in doing so. So Moses "heard" the Lord from within the burning bush. (Exodus, 3)
But this disability, although universal now, need not remain a permanent trait of all terrestrial being. For as "all life is fixed in an ascending scale" (342) and as "adaman-
tine is the evolving law" (342), in the march of the progressive evolution of consciousness, the instrumental transformation also is bound to follow ushering in its wake the development of a New Sight, the divine Sight which will be capable of seizing the supreme Form. And this thought and high hope on our part leads us to our next and final section.
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10. Sight:
Its Future Apotheosis:
We have at last come to the end of our essay. Although the survey has been rather brief given the scope and importance of the subject, we have been, we hope, able to cover the entire ground, albeit in bare outline. But the question is: Does the "sight" too end its itinerary here? Or, who knows, has it any further evolutionary prospect?
As Sri Aurobindo's Yoga is a Yoga of Integral Transformation, it is understood that it is not merely the inner consciousness which has to undergo divine transformation, even the outer physical system of man, including all its forms and functions, has to submit itself to the unrelenting process of supramental transformation. As Sri Aurobindo has affirmed in one of his last prose writings, "The Divine Body", published in 1949:
"...other numerous potentialities might appear and the body become an instrument immeasurably superior to what we can now imagine as possible. There could be an evolution from a first apprehending truth-consciousness to the utmost heights of the ascending ranges of supermind and it may pass the borders of the supermind proper itself where it
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begins to shadow out, develop, delineate expressive forms of life touched by a supreme pure Existence, consciousness and bliss... The transformation of the physical being might follow this incessant line of progression and the divine body reflect or reproduce here in a divine life on the earth something of this higher greatness and glory of the self-manifesting Spirit." (The Supramental Manifestation and Other Writings, 1989, p. 40)
Of course, it is the consciousness within which has first to change; for, our means and ways of knowledge and action must necessarily be according to the nature of our consciousness and "it is the consciousness that must radically change if we are to command and not only be occasionally visited by that higher power of knowledge." (The Synthesis of Yoga, p. 473)
Be that as it may, we can very well visualise that in the overall transformation of the physical system the sense of sight will not be faulted and excepted: this too will have the privilege of undergoing a supremely divine transfiguration.
Now what will be the results of this supramentalisation of sight? Sri Aurobindo has dealt with this question quite in detail in the chapter entitled "The Supramental Sense" in his book The Synthesis of Yoga. What follows below is an abridged adaptation of his observations:
"The lifting of the level of consciousness from the mind to the supermind and the consequent transformation of the being from the state of the mental to that of the supramental Purusha must bring with it... a transformation of all the parts of the nature and all its activities." There will be according-
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ly a profound transformation in the physical senses, "a supramentalising of the physical sight, hearing, touch, etc." that will reveal to us "a quite different view, not merely of life and its meaning, but even of the material world and all its forms and aspects."
The supramental eye will get a new and transfigured vision: its sight will acquire "an extraordinary totality and an immediate and embracing precision in which the whole and every detail [will] stand out at once in the complete harmony and vividness of the significance meant by Nature in the object..."
In the supramental seeing one will feel as if "it were the sight of the supreme divine Poet and Artist in which we were participating and there were given to us the full seeing of his truth and intention in his design of the universe and of each thing in the universe."
There will be an unlimited intensity which will make all that is seen "a revelation of the glory of quality and idea and form" and colour." The very physical eye will seem then "to carry in itself a spirit and a consciousness which sees not only the physical aspect of the object but the soul of quality in it, the vibration of energy, the light and force and spiritual substance of which it is made."
In this vision of the supramental eye there will always be the "revelation of the soul of the thing seen and of the universal Spirit that is expressing itself in this objective form of its own conscious being."
There will be at the same time a subtle change which will make the sight see in a sort of fourth dimension. The material object will become "to this sight something different from what we now see, not a separate object on the back-
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ground or in the environment of the rest of Nature, but an indivisible part ...an expression of the unity of all that we see."
To the supramentalised seeing the material world and material objects will cease to be material; they will be seen as spirit itself in a form of itself and a conscious extension. "The whole is a unity - the oneness unaffected by any multitudinousness of objects and details - held in and by the consciousness in a spiritual space and all substance there is conscious substance."
Such will be the apotheosis of sight when it gets supramentalised in course of its future evolution. Now here are some verses from Savitri embodying the vision of the future glory of our Eye:
(1)"... the secret sight man's blindness missed
Has opened its view past Time ..." (683)
(2)"See with the large eye of infinity" (696)
(3)"A vision which had scanned immortal things" (723)
(4)"The Supreme's gaze looked out through human
eyes" (31)
(5)"... the eyes of the Timeless... look out from Time"
(72)
(6)"The immense regard of immortality" (320)
(7)"Earth's seeing [shall] widen into the infinite." (344)
(8)"And from her eyes the Eternal's bliss shall gaze"
(346)
(9)"The superconscient's beam shall touch men's eyes"
(451)
(10) "And a soul's thoughts looked out from earth-bom
eyes" (485)
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(11)"Infinity turned its gaze on finite shapes" (526)
(12)"Can fill those orbs with an immortal's sight" (370)
(13)"Infinity's vision through thy gaze shall pierce,
Thou shalt look into the eyes of the Unknown"
(537)
(14)"Yet shall they look up as to peaks of God" (704)
(15)"His regard crossing infinity's mystic waves" (706)
(16)"The Spirit's eyes shall look through Nature's eyes"
(707)
(17)"The Spirit shall look out through Matter's gaze"
(709)
(18)"Time's sunflowers gaze at gold Eternity" (279)
(19)"And all earth look into the eyes of God" (450)
So the journey ends. And we are infinitely grateful to Maha-Rishi Maha-Kavi Sri Aurobindo for affording us the favour of walking in his luminous footsteps and following the long march of the ascent of sight from the "sightless sight" of the Inconscient up to the "closed eyes' sight" of the supreme Superconscient - surely not in living experience as in the case of Mahayogi Sri Aurobindo himself but as a meditative intellectual-cum-imaginative exercise. And that is surely no mean gain for us the ordinary mortals with our "clipped outlook" on things.
"Jayatu Sri Aurobindo" - "Victory to Sri Aurobindo"!
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