CHAPTER 6
1 There are exceptions, but they are few and far between. For an overview see Walsh and Shapiro, 2006.
2 According to Sheldrake (2005, p. 38) a recent exhibition in the Science Museum in London presented the human mind as the flight-deck of an aeroplane, but without a pilot. An unexpected Buddhist influence?
3 In the part of The Life Divine on which much of this discussion is based, Sri Aurobindo does not explicitly state that the distinction he makes between ‘knowledge by identity’ and ‘separative knowledge’ is equivalent to the traditional distinction between vidyā and avidyā, but I think it is a safe assumption.
4 There is also a dynamic aspect to this type of knowledge. Sri Aurobindo doesn’t mention it in this context, but logically the dynamic side of this type of knowledge should include skills, the ‘know-how’ to do things.
5 In contemporary psychology it is widely held that intuition is constructed subconsciously and only appears to pop-up ready-made. Sri Aurobindo calls this pseudo-intuition. Intuition is used here in the original sense of true knowledge that is not constructed, but that comes to us at least partially ‘ready-made’ from some inner or subtle source. Much of this article can be seen as an attempt to show that such direct knowledge actually exists and is worth cultivating systematically.
6 ‘At the same time’ may not be taken too literally. See the subsection entitled ‘Of balconies and birds’.
7 In a state of pure consciousness there is evidently no distinction between subject and object, but not everybody agrees that such states are possible (Steven Katz, 1978, pp. 62–63). Even Jung, who is for many an early hero of the transpersonal movement in psychology, seriously thought that a state without ego, and thus without a clear distinction between subject and object, would intrinsically be an unconscious state. This seems to betray a somewhat surprising lack of understanding of the Indian tradition. For a brilliant discussion of Jung’s position vis-à-vis Eastern thought, see Coward (1985).
8 In one famous experiment a video-clip is shown of two teams of six players, one team dressed in white, the other in black, who pass two balls on to each other in what looks like informal volleyball training. The observers are asked to count how often a white player manages to pass on a ball to another white player without a black player intercepting it. In the middle of the clip an actor dressed up as a black gorilla enters the scene, stands still in the middle, waves his two hands at the audience, and then moves out from the other side. Even when one shows this video clip to large audiences, there is hardly ever someone who sees the gorilla. If at the end, one tells the audience to relax and watch the video once more without counting anything, just for the sake of seeing if there is anything special they missed during the first viewing, nobody misses the gorilla, and most people have a hard time believing it is the same movie (see Simons & Chabris, 1999).
9 For a refutal of one of Dennett’s main arguments, see Cornelissen (2008).
10 The Sanskrit word dharma is difficult to translate. It denotes truth in the realm of agency. As such it is often translated as (moral, social) duty and even as religion, but especially the latter is not satisfactory, as dharma has a strong connotation of something that is part of one’s essential nature and that as such goes beyond social conventions.
11 Inwardly, subjectively, there is an interesting vertical dimension to our awareness of different types of consciousness: we tend to visualise the heavens above and the dark, subconscious realms below. We will come back to this later.
12 Sri Aurobindo claims that it is actually possible to cultivate intuitive knowledge to such an extent that it can take over all ordinary mental functions and become one’s normal way of knowing reality. We know from the diary Sri Aurobindo maintained during a few years of intense yogic practice, that he made this amazing claim not on the basis of literary exegesis or philosophical speculation, but on the basis of meticulously carried out experiments, of which he maintained a detailed day-to-day record. The ‘laboratory notes’ in this Record of Yoga (2003) are full of examples of detailed knowledge even about trivial events in the outer, material world, that would be extremely difficult to explain as constructed on the basis of sense-impressions and memories alone. For an interesting study of yogic powers and parapsychology, see Braud (2008).
13 ‘Inevitable’ is the highest ‘grade’ in Sri Aurobindo’s appraisal of lines of poetry in terms of their level of inspiration.
14 This is significant as the Vedas, from where this simile hails, are extremely terse; they are like mathematical formulas of the spirit, and there is never a word too many. Each word covers a world of meanings.
15 Sri Aurobindo looks at the Darwinian evolution as gradual emancipation of consciousness. He holds that just as life has developed in matter, and mind has developed in embodied life, still higher forms of consciousness are bound to develop in embodied mind. Sri Aurobindo looks at yoga as a concentrated attempt in the individual to achieve in a short period what Nature itself is working out at her own speed on a larger scale.
16 At the end of a passage where he describes several ways to silence the mind, Sri Aurobindo says, ‘In a complete silence only is the Silence heard; in a pure peace only is its Being revealed. Therefore to us the name of That is the Silence and the Peace.’
17 The dimensionality of the ‘inner’ or subtle experience of consciousness is an intriguing phenomenon that one finds mentioned throughout spiritual literature, and that consistently returns in experience. In the ‘inner’ experience, one can actually centre one’s consciousness at different vertical levels, and more or less deeply ‘inside’. I will come back to this in the next section.
18 I’m not aware of hard statistical data on this issue, but both tradition and personal experience tell that ‘enlightenment’, which is closely related to one’s capacity for knowledge by identity, tends to bring with it some degree of telepathic capacity, even though clairvoyants are certainly not always enlightened.
19 For more details see Sri Aurobindo’s The Synthesis of Yoga and The Life Divine. A short summary of the system can be found in Cornelissen (2005) and a more detailed account in Dalal (2001).
20 Cakras, Sanskrit—centres of different types of consciousness arranged one above the other in the subtle body. Though the idea that different types of conscious activity take place at different locations in the body has been worked out in much more detail in the Indian tradition, traces of it occur even in the English language, for example, ‘use your head’ means ‘think better’; ‘open your heart’ means ‘feel more compassion’; ‘follow your gut-feelings’ means ‘follow your basic life instincts’. In an interesting example, Matt Frei (2008) wrote for BBC News, ‘[I]f America votes with its heart, it will elect Obama. If it votes with its gut, it will go for McCain.’
21 I could have written ‘in that state’ but at the risk of being accused of occultism, I have chosen consciously for ‘in that world’ as the latter appears more accurate. In many contexts, ‘state’ and ‘world’ are interchangeable, but they do not have the same connotations. ‘State’ stresses that what one describes happens inside the mind of an individual and is dependent on its condition. ‘World’ stresses the complexity and internal coherence of what one experiences, and it implies some kind of objective existence, though the latter can be apparent only (as in, ‘a dream world’). I am inclined to think that what I describe here are indeed worlds, not just states. They seem to pre-exist independent of the human mind, though what one actually experiences is indeed dependent on one’s inner condition. According to Sri Aurobindo this is equally true for all worlds, even for the ordinary physical world: all worlds come about in an interaction between puruṣa and prakṛti, self and nature, conscious being as subject and the same conscious being as object. They differ from each other in the type of consciousness on the subject and on the object side.
22 Vijñana is here used in its older sense of the Gnostic link-plane between the upper and lower hemispheres, equivalent to the Vedic mahas. In later times the same word was used in the much-diluted sense of intellect. In both cases vijñana is the plane above the manas. In the Vedic sense which Sri Aurobindo uses, it is the plane entirely above the mind as a whole, in the later sense it is used for a plane above the sense-mind, but still within the mind in its more general sense.
23 Sri Aurobindo describes these higher planes of consciousness with an exemplary and, one must add, rather rare intellectual discipline and ‘rectitude’. From his diaries and the autobiographical poetry he wrote during the same periods as his published writings, we know that he carefully avoided quoting the sometimes strong claims of classical Sanskrit texts if he had not on the one hand fully understood their implications, and on the other seen them supported by his own experience. This, together with the detailed studies he made of our ordinary human nature as seen from the higher planes of consciousness with an eye on its transformation, make his work so exceedingly interesting for Psychology.
24 With ‘self’ I mean here the eternal centre of one’s consciousness, the ātman, or the puruṣa of the Indian tradition, not the western ‘self-concept’, which corresponds in the Indian tradition more closely with the ahaṁkāra, the constructed, socially determined egoic centre in the outer nature, with which the real self erroneously identifies.
25 It may be noted that integration is not the same as amalgamation. In amalgamation, the original substances lose their own qualities and get merged into a new, essentially amorphous substance. In integration, the differences of the various parts are carefully maintained and uplifted into a new, and more complex unity (like the various parts of a car, that find the fulfilment of their existence in their cooperation in the workings of the larger unit of which they are the constituents.) True integration is above all not constructed with the mind, but an offering, a taking up in the pre-existing higher oneness of the conscious existence of the Divine.