Supermind and Intuitive Self

The secret Self within us is an intuitive self.
But instead of thinking of Supermind one has first to open oneself to Intuition.

In man, any emergence of the supermind must be a gradual and at first an imperfect creation and to his customary mind the activity of an exceptional and supernormal will and knowledge.

In the first place it will not be for him a native power always enjoyed without interruption, but a secret potentiality which has to be discovered

His task is complex and difficult because he is an evolutionary being and by the evolution of Nature of which he is a part he has been constituted with an inferior kind of knowledge, and this inferior, this mental power of knowledge forms by its persistent customary action an obstacle to a new formation greater than its own nature.

In fact the change is only possible if there is first a spiritual development on our present level of consciousness and it can only be undertaken securely when the mind has become aware of the greater self within, enamoured of the Infinite and confident of the presence and guidance of the Divine and his Shakti.

The problem of this conversion resolves itself at first into a passage through a mediary status and by the help of the one power already at work in the human mind which we can recognise as something supramental in its nature or at least in its origin, the faculty of intuition, a power of which we can feel the presence and the workings and are impressed, when it acts, by its superior efficiency, light, direct inspiration and force, but cannot understand or analyse it as we understand or analyse the workings of our reason

The power of intuition acts in us at present for the most part in a covert manner secret and involved in or mostly veiled by the action of the reason and the normal intelligence.

The mental powers immediately proceed to lay hold on these things and to manipulate and utilise them for our mental or vital purposes, to adapt them to the forms of the inferior knowledge.

 Thus the intuition intervening in the ordinary mental operations acts in lightning flashes that make lustrous a space of truth, but is not a steady sunlight illumining securely the whole reach and kingdom of our thought and will and feeling and action.

There are two necessary lines of progress which we must follow, and the first is to extend the action of the intuition.

This cannot wholly be done so long as the ordinary mind continues to assert its power of independent action and intervention or its habit of seizing on the light of the intuition and manipulating it for its own purposes. The higher mentality cannot be complete or secure so long as the inferior intelligence is able to deform it or even to bring in any of its own intermixture.

 And either then we must silence altogether the intellect and the intellectual will and the other inferior activities and leave room only for the intuitive action or we must lay hold on and transform the lower action by the constant pressure of the intuition. Or else there must be an alternation and combination of the two methods if that be the most natural way or at all possible.
And when we learn to insist on no particular method as exclusively the right one and leave the whole movement to a greater guidance, we find that the divine Lord of the Yoga commissions his Shakti to use one or the other at different times and all in combination according to the need and turn of the being and the nature.

At first it might seem the straight and right way is to silence the mind, the intellect, the mental and personal will, the desire mind and the mind of emotion and sensation, and to allow in that silence the Self,And this is indeed a great and powerful discipline.

 Nevertheless it is not the fact that by this method the supramental light will immediately replace the lower mind and reflective reason, the old powers will yet interfere, if not from within, from without, and an inferior mentality will mix in, will question or obstruct or will try to lay hold on, to lower or darken or distort or minimise it in the process.

A second movement is one which comes naturally to those who commence the Yoga with the initiative that is proper to the way of Bhakti. It is natural to them to reject the intellect and its action and to listen for the voice, wait for the impulsion or the command, the adesha, obey only the idea and will and power of the Lord within them, the divine Self and Purusha in the heart of the creature.

 This is a movement which must tend more and more to intuitivize the whole nature, for the ideas, the will, the impulsion, the feelings which come from the secret Purusha in the heart are of a direct intuitive character. This method is consonant with a certain truth of our nature, as the secret Self within us is an intuitive self.

(all writings from Sri Aurobindo)