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)
