in its light and under its government psychicise our inner and outer parts, turn mind-nature, life-nature, body-nature and all our mental, vital, physical action and states and movements into a conscious instrumentation of the soul. Afterwards or concurrently we have to spiritualise the being in its entirety by a descent of a divine Light, Force, Purity, Knowledge, freedom and wideness. It is necessary to break down the limits of the per¬ sonal mind, life and physicality, dissolve the ego, enter into the cosmic consciousness, realise the self, acquire a spiritualised and universalised mind and heart, life-force, physical consciousness. Then only the passage into supramental consciousness begins to become possible, and even then there is a difficult ascent to make each stage of which is a separate arduous achievement. Yoga is a rapid and concentrated conscious evolution of the being, but however rapid, even though it may effect in a single life what in an unassisted Nature might take centuries and millenniums or many hundreds of lives, still all evolution must move by stages; even the greatest rapidity and concentration of the movement cannot swallow up all the stages or reverse natural process and bring the end near to the beginning. A hasty and ignorant mind, a too eager force easily forget this necessity; they rush forward to make the supermind an immediate aim and expect to pull it down with a pitchfork from its highest heights in the Infinite. This is not only an absurd expectation but full of danger. For the vital desire may very well bring in an action of dark or vehement vital powers which hold out before it a promise of immediate fulfilment of its impossible longing; the consequence is likely to be a plunge into many kinds of self-deception, a yielding to the falsehoods and temptations of the forces of darkness, a hunt for supernormal powers, a turning away from the Divine to the Asuric nature, a fatal self-inflation into an unnatural unhuman and undivine bigness of magnified ego. If the being is small, the nature weak and incapable, there is not this large-scale disaster; but a loss of balance, a mental unhinging and fall into unrea¬ son or a vital unhinging and consequent moral aberration or a deviation into some kind of morbid abnormality of the nature may be the untoward consequence. This is not a Yoga in which
The Supermind and the Yoga of Works
abnormality of any kind, even if it be an exalted abnormality, can be admitted as a way to self-fulfilment or spiritual realisa¬ tion. Even when one enters into supernormal and suprarational experience, there should be no disturbance of the poise which must be kept firm from the summit of the consciousness to its base; the experiencing consciousness must preserve a calm bal¬ ance, an unfailing clarity and order in its observation, a sort of sublimated commonsense, an unfailing power of self-criticism, right discrimination, coordination and firm vision of things; a sane grasp on facts and a high spiritualised positivism must always be there. It is not by becoming irrational or infrarational that one can go beyond ordinary nature into supernature; it should be done by passing through reason to a greater light of superreason. This superreason descends into reason and takes it up into higher levels even while breaking its limitations; reason is not lost but changes and becomes its own true unlimited self, a coordinating power of the supernature.
Another error that has to be guarded against is also one to which our mentality is easily prone; it is to take some higher intermediate consciousness or even any kind of supernormal consciousness for the supermind. To reach supermind it is not enough to go above the ordinary movements of the human mind; it is not enough to receive a greater light, a greater power, a greater joy or to develop capacities of knowledge, sight, effective will that surpass the normal range of the human being. All light is not the light of the spirit, still less is all light the light of the super¬ mind; the mind, the vital, the physical itself have lights of their own, as yet hidden, which can be very inspiring, exalting, in¬ formative, powerfully executive. A breaking out into the cosmic consciousness may also bring in an immense enlargement of the consciousness and power. An opening into the inner mind, inner vital, inner physical, any range of the subliminal consciousness, can liberate an activity of abnormal or supernormal powers of knowledge, action or experience which the uninstructed mind can easily mistake for spiritual revelations, inspirations, intu¬ itions. An opening upward into the greater ranges of the higher mental being can bring down much light and force creating
The Yoga of Divine Works
an intense activity of the intuitivised mind and life-power or an ascent into these ranges can bring a true but still incomplete light easily exposed to mixture, a light which is spiritual in its source though it does not always remain spiritual in its active character when it comes down into the lower nature. But none of these things is the supramental light, the supramental power; that can only be seen and grasped when we have reached the summits of mental being, entered into overmind and stand on the borders of an upper, a greater hemisphere of spiritual existence. There the ignorance, the inconscience, the original blank Nescience slowly awaking towards a half-knowledge, which are the basis of material Nature and which surround, penetrate and power¬ fully limit all our powers of mind and life, cease altogether; for an unmixed and unmodified Truth-consciousness is there the sub¬ stance of all the being, its pure spiritual texture. To imagine that we have reached such a condition when we are still moving in the dynamics of the Ignorance, though it may be an enlightened or illumined Ignorance, is to lay ourselves open either to a dis¬ astrous misleading or to an arrest of the evolution of the being. For if it is some inferior state that we thus mistake for the super¬ mind, it lays us open to all the dangers we have seen to attend a presumptuous egoistic haste in our demand for achievement. If it is one of the higher states that we presume to be the highest, we may, though we achieve much, yet fall short of the greater, more perfect goal of our being; for we shall remain content with an approximation and the supreme transformation will escape us. Even the achievement of a complete inner liberation and a high spiritual consciousness is not that supreme transformation; for we may have that achievement, a status perfect in itself, in essence, and still our dynamic parts may in their instrumenta¬ tion belong to an enlightened spiritualised mind and may be in consequence, like all mind, defective even in its greater power and knowledge, still subject to a partial or local obscuration or a limitation by the original circumscribing nescience.
Part II
The Yoga of Integral Knowledg
Chapter I
The Object of Knowledge
All spiritual seeking moves towards an object of Knowledge to which men ordinarily do not turn the eye of the mind, to someone or something Eternal, Infinite, Absolute that is not the temporal things or forces of which we are sensible, although he or it may be in them or behind them or their source or creator. It aims at a state of knowledge by which we can touch, enter or know by identity this Eternal, Infinite and Absolute, a consciousness other than our ordinary consciousness of ideas and forms and things, a Knowledge that is not what we call knowledge but something self-existent, everlasting, infinite. And although it may or even necessarily must, since man is a mental creature, start from our ordinary instruments of knowledge, yet it must as necessarily go beyond them and use supra-sensuous and supramental means and faculties, for it is in search of something that is itself supra- sensuous and supramental and beyond the grasp of the mind and senses, even if through mind and sense there can come a first glimpse of it or a reflected image.
The traditional systems, whatever their other differences, all proceed on the belief or the perception that the Eternal and Absolute can only be or at least can only inhabit a pure tran¬ scendent state of non-cosmic existence or else a non-existence. All cosmic existence or all that we call existence is a state of ignorance. Even the highest individual perfection, even the most blissful cosmic condition is no better than a supreme ignorance. All that is individual, all that is cosmic has to be austerely renounced by the seeker of the absolute Truth. The supreme quiescent Self or else the absolute Nihil is the sole Truth, the only object of spiritual knowledge. The state of knowledge, the consciousness other than this temporal that we must attain is Nirvana, an extinction of ego, a cessation of all mental, vital
The Yoga of Integral Knowledge
and physical activities, of all activities whatsoever, a supreme illumined quiescence, the pure bliss of an impersonal tranquil¬ lity self-absorbed and ineffable. The means are meditation, a concentration excluding all things else, a total loss of the mind in its object. Action is permissible only in the first stages of the search in order to purify the seeker and make him morally and temperamentally a fit vessel for the knowledge. Even this action must either be confined to the performance of the rites of worship and the prescribed duties of life rigorously ordained by the Hindu Shastra or, as in the Buddhistic discipline, must be guided along the eightfold path to the supreme practice of the works of compassion which lead towards the practical an¬ nihilation of self in the good of others. In the end, in any severe and pure Jnanayoga, all works must be abandoned for an entire quiescence. Action may prepare salvation; it cannot give it. Any continued adherence to action is incompatible with the highest progress and may be an insuperable obstacle to the attainment of the spiritual goal. The supreme state of quiescence is the very opposite of action and cannot be attained by those who persist in works. And even devotion, love, worship are disciplines for the unripe soul, are at best the best methods of the Ignorance. For they are offered to something other, higher and greater than ourselves; but in the supreme knowledge there can be no such thing, since there is either only one self or no self at all and therefore either no one to do the worship and offer the love and devotion or no one to receive it. Even thought-activity must disappear in the sole consciousness of identity or of nothingness and by its own quiescence bring about the quiescence of the whole nature. The absolute Identical alone must remain or else the eternal Nihil.
This pure Jnanayoga comes by the intellect, although it ends in the transcendence of the intellect and its workings. The thinker in us separates himself from all the rest of what we phenomenally are, rejects the heart, draws back from the life and the senses, separates from the body that he may arrive at his own exclusive fulfilment in that which is beyond even himself and his function. There is a truth that underlies, as there is
<!« a4A*“' - - ^
aimliis a Iruth ouKc woilTin«nJi^;i: .inTeocni)Uxyfc«« S4u-#»mpttfcr ;ini-i<i *ir.haot - v<'^t>4-4)>la^< aitow* »wl«>
\ tu
ii^
Ihc *o^t^ri\u. m to
I m JtjiI tfl Trr^n^Jft yilTr- ‘V^ii ' 'T* ■
r <gy^TK4r45i.u V-finfcSj?! he cA>'}^ t of the SufKCfre Will a culminalioo in which the whoje being
to riMfctjj^ucccs^ivch the body, the Ufr, thc^?<tU-A ^fe£.i«a, hesut- thcifi^^^ ip *1“*^
we arc at » i w iiK-an*
an intc^ial ^JSfulfilu^nC^e only thing t-lTminatcd baSng
« thcq^frfrt' I^SIU' oT^c iTTc wlucOiy>rv.a as meie Aj ^
, 7^-vs?pSj^e’?f;t?se^i™
4U«utr^i£^fC4 withjL^Kii auhjcclion tomatctialji^^^: and to^<^tyl ^n- the hc.nl
.o! the ihtnw^witJOU w
L l"*y^**^ / hn?lt&r^vf«fluiTw concen-
S' :;*j^^ri^ tration!t. H j(n intee.al a».lf-;uifiluient. !■ wt. n.l. it, -tWn
la^t liM niiiffi- ciuyi^aliiT^Tw the exjKiric**ce» of the ^—
tit whifh will ijtiUf^t i inTViii t of los*!*, joy, dy vtticn > and wofthVj^fS^*tne^^ m>4iU‘nVs^ ^ ^ f. _ ^ ^
-^suit of di\tn. J e luly and gco<3 in trf fr/rusol Ahine«^loj_ . , ^ »,
**M3g^T^~i'w tm »iHiii^hM‘n <*t|tT^ f'M? in- which :HI lhr?c tior^ coewi th^i I j&rh t^jenh tnix t ai^ find the:r own ahSoIottWiM 60KU thing utftii^ other than thein -clvc» from which th^* ^ s —
an allciLsl awayv*. » ^ ^
I -f- TliU. at krist, is the standpoint we Jia'x- tak n. and
it IS the whole sense of what we hai-c celled the mtc|;ial Yori. In applying or adapting thi Yoga yf knowUdge to this ii.tegial view and to a syntlictic p^sts, we must '- - ^ -
C 7 3tA4-sjt Ue
s n p p poi^p^pse/.^ -»f PI ^p C(S<'|SM A*. eAW-w »pf»pp ^ s^pp/Spp/ Ap^p,pip^<»-
^yc/ Ippfrp^ tfepe-Ppp— y «pp« ppp^p>. IP PJ-O 'Ccp^ pPsPrAfill*^ ^ Op,^. p. ffC-4t,
ipppi -fcM- -kipJ. IP.^ p~-e pfppp. <1.. pp <tp ^*.1 Aa^ppp.^ «4 '^C-.-C-pi ,