Dalal, A. S. (Ed.)  A greater psychology:  An introduction to Sri Aurobindo's psychological thought.  New York:  Jeremy P. Tarcher/Putnam.

 

I.          General

 

p. 9      "So there are ranges of consciousness above and below the human range, with which the normal human has no contact and they seem to it unconscious, supramental of overmental and submental ranges…The gradations of consciousness are universal states not dependent on the outlook of the subjective personality;  rather the outlook of the subjective personality is determined by the grade of consciousness in which it is organised according to its typal nature or its evolutionary stage."  [Letters on Yoga, pp. 233-235]

 

p. 23    "…the truth is that …this sea of which our waking consciousness is only a wave or series of waves, cannot be described by any one term, for it is very complex.  Part of it is subconscient, lower than our waking consciousness, part of it is on a level with it but behind and much larger than it;  part is above and superconscient to us.  What we call our mind is only an outer mind, a surface mental action, instrumental for the partial expression of a larger mind behind of which we are not ordinarily aware and can only know by going inside ourselves."  [Letters on Yoga, pp. 348-349]

 

p. 38    "There are three occult sources of our action – the superconscient, the subliminal, the subconscient, but of none of them are we in control or even aware.  What we are aware of is the surface being which is only an instrumental arrangement.  The source of all is the general Nature, -- universal Nature individualising itself in each person;  for this general Nature deposits certain habits of movement, personality, character, faculties, dispositions, tendencies in us, and that, whether formed now or before our birth, is what we usually call ourselves.  A good deal of this is in habitual movement and use in our known conscious parts on the surface, a great deal more is concealed in the other unknown three which are below or behind the surface."  [Letters on Yoga, p. 358]

 

            Aurobindo discusses "Buddhi mind" (sounds like 2^nd Tier thinking) :

p.49     "…in the ordinary consciousness everything gets mixed up together and there is no clear order or rule.  In the yoga one becomes aware of the different parts and their proper action, and puts each in its place and to its proper action under the control of the higher Consciousness…"  [Letters on Yoga, p. 330]

 

            on chakras & vital being areas

p.62-63            "There are four parts of the vital being – first, the mental vital which gives a mental expression by thought, speech or otherwise to the emotions, desires, passions, sensations and other movements of the vital being;  the emotional vital which is the seat of various feelings, such as love, joy, sorrow, hatred, and the rest;  the central vital which is the seat of the stronger vital longings and reactions, e.g. ambition, pride, fear, love of fame, attractions and repulsions, desires and passions of various kinds and the field of many vital energies;  last, the lower vital which is occupied with small desires and feelings, such as make the greater part of daily life, e.g. food desire, sexual desire, small likings, dislikings, vanity, quarrels, love of praise, anger at blame, little wishes of all kinds – and a numberless host of other things.  Their respective seats are:  (1)  the region from the throat to the heart, (2)  the heart (it is a double centre, belonging in front to the emotional and vital and behind to the psychic), (3)  from the heart to the navel, (4)  below the navel."  [Letters on Yoga, p. 334]

 

            on the meeting of involution & evolution

p. 74    "Our subliminal self is not, like our surface physical being, an outcome of the energy of the Inconscient;  it is a meeting-place of the consciousness that emerges from below by evolution and the consciousness that has descended from above for involution."  [The Life Divine, p. 425]

 

            frontal development vs. witness/deeper-soul development

p. 107  "In a certain sense the various Purushas or beings in us, psychic, mental, vital, physical are projections of the Atman, but that gets its full truth only when we get into our inner being and know the inner truth of ourselves.  On the surface, in the Ignorance, it is the mental, vital, physical Prakriti that acts and the Purusha is disfigured, as it were, in the action of the Prakriti.  It is not our true mental being, our true vital being, our true physical being even that we are aware of;  these remain behind, veiled and silent.  It is the mental, vital, physical ego that we take for our being until we get knowledge."  [Letters on Yoga, p. 300]

 

            on peak/peek experiences vs. stable transformation

p. 122-123       "The Mind can only be aware of the Self in a mentalised spiritual thinness, only of the mind-reflected Sachchidananda.  The highest truth, the integral self-knowledge is not to be gained by this self-blinded leap into the Absolut but by a patient transit beyond the mind into the Truth-Consciousness where the Infinite can be known, felt, seen, experienced in all the fullness of its unending riches."  [The Synthesis of Yoga, pp. 281-282]

 

            on the ontogenetic involution of the transpersonal

pp.141-142      "It is possible without an actual ascent into these at present super-conscient mental planes or without a constant or permanent living in them, by openness to them, by reception of their knowledge and influences, to get rid to a certain extent of our constitutional and psychological ignorance;  it is possible to be aware of ourselves as spiritual beings and to spiritualise, though imperfectly, our normal human life and consciousness.  There could be a conscious communication and guidance from this greater more luminous mentality and a reception of its enlightening and transforming forces.  This is within the reach of the highly developed or the spiritually awakened human being;  but it would not be more than a preliminary stage.  To reach an integral self-knowledge, an entire consciousness and power of being, there is necessary an ascent beyond the plane of our normal mind.  Such an ascent is at present possible in an absorbed superconscience;  but that could lead only to an entry into the higher levels in a state of immobile ecstatic trance.  If the control of that highest spiritual being is to be brought into our waking life, there must be a conscious heightening and widening into immense ranges of new being, new consciousness, new potentialities of action, a taking up, -- as integral as possible, -- of our present being, consciousness, activities and a transmutation of them into divine values which would effect a transfiguration of our human existence.  For wherever a radical transition has to be made, there is always this triple movement, -- ascent, widening of field and base, integration, -- in Nature's method of self-transcendence."  [The Life Divine, pp. 736-737]

 

            On the ever present ability to tap into the Witness:

p.79-80            "The psychical consciousness…as exercised by clairvoyants, mediums and others…is often, and indeed usually, a specialised faculty limited though often precise and accurate in action, and implies no development of the inner soul or the spiritual being or the higher intelligence."  [The Synthesis of Yoga, pp. 861-862]

 

            On the nature of epistemology in the East, i.e., valid knowledge quests

p. 183  "Those who were only philosophic intellectuals were respected for their learning but never took rand as truth-discoverers.  And the philosophies that lacked a sufficiently powerful means of spiritual experience died out and became things of the past because they were not dynamic for spiritual discovery and realisation." [Letters on Yoga, pp. 159-160]

 

 

II.        Levels / Planes of Being

 

Physical-Mind   (Sensorimotor)

 

p. 43    "The physical man has a vital part, but it is mainly made up of the smaller instinctive and impulsive formations of life-consciousness emerging from the subconscient, along with a customary crowd or round of sensations, desires, hopes, feelings, satisfactions which are dependent on external things and external contacts and concerned with the practical, the immediately realisable and possible, the habitual, the common and average." 

 

 

p. 43-44           "[Physical man] has a mental part, but this too is customary, traditional, practical, objective, and respects what belongs to the domain of mind mostly for its utility for the support, comfort, use, satisfaction and entertainment of his physical and sensational existence.  For the physical mind takes its stand on matter and the material world, on the body and the bodily life, on sense-experience and on a normal practical mentality and its experience.  All that is not of this order, the physical mind builds up as a restricted superstructure dependent upon the external sense-mentality.  Even so, it regards these higher contents of life as either helpful adjuncts or a superfluous but pleasant luxury of imaginations, feelings and thought-abstractions, not as inner realities;  or, even if it receives them as realities, it does not feel them concretely and substantially in their own proper substance, subtler than the physical substance and its grosser concreteness, -- it treats them as a subjective, less substantial extension from physical realities."  [The Life Divine, pp. 717-718]

 

p. 46    "The physical mind is that part of the mind which is concerned with the physical things only – it depends on the sense-mind, sees only objects, external actions, draws its ideas from the data given by external things, infers from them only and knows no other Truth until it is enlightened from above."  [Letters on Yoga, p. 327]

 

p. 47    "…it is strong in childhood because the thinking mind is not developed and has besides a narrow range of interests.  Afterwards it becomes an undercurrent in the mental activities."  [Letters on Yoga, pp. 347-348]

 

p. 67    "…the body is not mere unconscious Matter:  it is a structure of a secretly conscious Energy that has taken form in it.  Itself occultly conscious, it is, at the same time, the vehicle of expression of an overt Consciousness that has emerged and is self-aware in our physical energy-substance."  [The Life Divine, p. 305]

 

p. 68    "The body[-consciousness] and the physical do not coincide – the body consciousness is only part of the whole physical consciousness."  [Letters on Yoga, p. 1445]

 

Vital –Mind  (Preoperational)

 

p.44-45            "The vital man…is the man of desire and sensation, the man of force and action, the man of passion and emotion, the kinetic individual:  he many and does lay great stress on the material existence, but he give it, even when most preoccupied with its present actualities, a push for life-experiences, for force of realisation, for life-extension, for life-power, for life-affirmation and life-expansion which is Nature's first impetus towards enlargement of the being;  at a highest intensity of this life-impetus, he becomes the breaker of bonds, the seeker of new horizons, the disturber of the past and present in the interest of the future.  He has a mental life which is often enslaved to the vital force and its desires and passions, and it is these he seeks to satisfy through the mind:  but when he interests himself strongly in mental things, he can become the mental adventurer, the opener of the way to new mind-formations or the fighter for an idea, the sensitive type of artist, the dynamic poet of life or the prophet or champion of a cause.  The vital mind is kinetic and therefore a great force in the working of evolutionary Nature."  [The Life Divine, pp. 718-719]

 

p. 47    "There is a part of the nature which I have called the vital mind;  the function of this mind is not to think and reason, to perceive, consider and find out or value things, for that is the function of the thinking mind proper, buddhi, -- to plan or dream or imagine what can be done."  [Letters on Yoga, p. 334]

 

p. 48    "It must be distinguished from the reasoning will which plans and arranges things according tot he dictates of the thinking mind proper, the discriminating reason or according to the mental intuition or a direct insight and judgement.  The vital mind uses thought for the service not of reason but of life-push and life-power and when it calls in reasoning it uses that for justifying the dictates of these powers, imposes their dictates on the reason instead of governing by a discriminating will the action of the life-forces."  [Letters on Yoga, p. 341]

 

Thinking-Mind  (these quotes address Aurobindo's Concrete and Logical minds)

 

p. 45    "[Thinking mind] is a mind-plane of pure thought and intelligence to which the things of the mental world are the most important realities;  those who are under its influence, the philosopher, thinker, scientist, intellectual creator, the man of the idea, the man of the written or spoken word, the idealist and dreamer are the present mental being at his highest attained summit."  [The Life Divine, p. 719]

 

p.45-46            "…to live in mind and the things of the mind, to be an intelligence rather than a life and a body, is our highest position, short of spirituality, in the degrees of Nature."  [The Life Divine pp. 719-720]

 

p. 48    "…there is still another clearer reflective mentality behind the dynamic and vital which is capable of escaping from this absorption in life and views itself as assuming life and body in order to image out in active relations of energy that which it perceives in will and thought."  [The Life Divine, p. 169]

 

p. 48    "…we sometimes mistake [thinking-mind] for the pure spirit as we mistake the dynamic mind for the soul."  [The Life Divine, p. 169]

 

p.48     "[Thinking mind]…is able to perceive and deal with other souls as other forms of its pure self;  it is capable of sensing them by pure mental impact and communication and no longer only by vital and nervous impact and physical indications;  it conceives too a mental figure of unity, and in its activity and its will it can create and possess more directly – not only indirectly as in the ordinary physical life – and in other minds and lives as well as its own." [The Life Divine, p. 169]

 

p.48     "But still even this pure mentality does not escape from the original error of mind.  For it is still its separate mental self which it makes the judge, witness and centre of the universe and through it alone strives to arrive at its own higher self and reality;  all others are "others" grouped to it around itself:  when it wills to be free, it has to draw back from life and mind in order to disappear into the real unity.  For there is still the veil created by Avidya between the mental and supramental action;  an image of the Truth get through, not the Truth itself." [The Life Divine, pp. 169-170]

 

 

 

 

 

Higher-Mind  (Vision-Logic)

 

p. 143  "Our first decisive step out of our human intelligence, our normal mentality, is an ascent into higher Mind, a mind no longer of mingled light and obscurity or half-light, but a large clarity of the Spirit."  [The Life Divine, p. 939]

 

p. 144  "…its special character, its activity of consciousness are dominated by Thought;  it is a luminous thought-mind, a mind of Spirit-born conceptual knowledge.  An all-awareness emerging from the original identity, carrying the truths the identity held in itself, conceiving swiftly, victoriously, multitudinously, formulating and by self-power of the Idea effectually realising its conceptions, is the character of this greater mind of knowledge.  This kind of cognition is the last that emerges from the original spiritual identity before the initiation of a separative knowledge, base of the Ignorance;  it is therefore the first that meets us when we rise from conceptive and ratiocinative mind, our best-organised knowledge-power of the Ignorance, into the realms of the Spirit…."  [The Life Divine, pp. 939-940]

 

p. 145  "It can freely express itself in single ideas, but its most characteristic movement is a mass ideation, a system or totality of truth-seeing at a single view;  the relations of idea with idea, of truth with truth are not established by logic but pre-exist and emerge already self-seen in the integral whole." [The Life Divine, p. 940]

 

 

            Illumined-Mind  (Psychic)

           

p. 146  "This greater Force is that of the Illumined Mind, a Mind no longer of higher Thought, but of spiritual light." [The Life Divine, p. 944]

 

p. 147  "The Illumined Mind does not work primarily by thought, but by vision;  thought is here only a subordinate movement expressive of sight." [The Life Divine, p. 945]

 

p. 148  "A consciousness that proceeds by sight, the consciousness of the seer, is a greater power for knowledge than the consciousness of the thinker.  The perceptual power of inner sight is greater and more direct than the perceptual power of thought;  it is a spiritual sense that seizes something of the substance of Truth and not only her figure…."  [The Life Divine, p. 946]

 

p. 148  "As Higher Mind brings a greater consciousness into the being through the spiritual idea and its power of truth, so the Illumined Mind brings in a still greater consciousness through a Truth-sight and Truth-light and its seeing and seizing power." [The Life Divine, p. 946]

 

 

 

 

Intuition-Mind  (Subtle)

 

p. 149  "Intuition is a power of consciousness nearer and more intimate to the original knowledge by identity;  for it is always something that leaps out direct from a concealed identity.  It is when the consciousness of the subject meets with the consciousness in the object, penetrates it and sees, feels or vibrates with the truth of what it contacts, that the intuition leaps out like a spark or lightning-flash from the shock of the meeting…."  [The Life Divine, p. 946]

 

p. 151  "Intuition is always an edge or ray or outleap of a superior light;  it is in us a projecting blade, edge or point of a far-off supermind light entering into and modified by some intermediate truth-mind substance above us and, so modified, again entering into and very much blinded by our ordinary or ignorant mind-substance;  but on that higher level to which it is native its light is unmixed and therefore entirely and purely veridical, and its rays are not separated but connected or massed together in a play of waves of what might almost be called in the Sanskrit poetic figure a sea or mass of 'stable lightnings'. "  [The Life Divine, p. 949]

 

p. 152  "Intuition has a fourfold power.  A power of revelatory truth-seeing, a power of inspiration or truth-hearing, a power of truth-touch or immediate seizing of significance, which is akin to the ordinary nature of its intervention in our mental intelligence, a power of true and automatic discrimination of the orderly and exact relation of truth to truth, -- these are the fourfold potencies of Intuition." [The Life Divine, p. 949]

 

p. 152-153       "A certain integration can thus take place, but whether it is a total integration must depend on the extent to which the new light is able to take up the subconscient and penetrate the fundamental  Inconscience.  Here the intuitive light and power may be hampered in its task because it is the edge of a delegated and modified Supermind, but does not bring in the whole mass or body of the identity-knowledge.  The basis of Inconscience in our nature is too vast, deep, and solid to be altogether penetrated, turned into light, transformed by an inferior power of the Truth-nature." [The Life Divine, p. 950]

 

Overmind  (Causal)

 

p. 153  "But… the Overmind, even when it is selective and not total in its action, is still a power of cosmic consciousness, a principle of global knowledge which carries in it a delegated light from the supramental Gnosis.  It is, therefore, only by an opening into the cosmic consciousness that the overmind ascent and descent can be made wholly possible:  a high and intense individual opening is not sufficient, -- to that vertical ascent towards summit Light there must be added a vast horizontal expansion of the consciousness into some totality of the Spirit." [The Life Divine, p. 950]

 

p. 153  "When the Overmind descends, the predominance of the centralising ego-sense is entirely subordinated, lost in the largeness of being and finally abolished;  a wide cosmic perception and feeling of boundless universal self and movement replaces it:  many motions that were formerly egocentric may still continue, but they occur as currents or ripples in the cosmic wideness." [The Life Divine, p. 950]

 

p. 154  "…Overmind has a great plasticity and is a field of multiple possibilities.  In place of an uncentred and unplaced diffusion there may be the sense of the universe in oneself or as oneself:  but there too this self is not the ego;  it is an extension of a free and pure essential self-consciousness or it is an identification with the All…."  [The Life Divine, p. 951]

 

p. 155  "In the transition towards the Supermind this centralising action tends towards the discovery of a true individual replacing the dead ego, a being who is in his essence one with the supreme Self, one with the universe in extension and yet a cosmic centre and circumference of the specialised action of the Infinite." [The Life Divine, p. 953]

 

p. 157  "Nescience would remain;  it would be as if a sun and its system were to shine out in an original darkness of Space and illumine everything as far as its rays could reach so that all that dwelt in the light would feel as if no darkness were there at all in their experience of existence.  But outside that sphere or expanse of experience the original darkness would still be there and, since all things are possible in an overmind structure, could reinvade the island of light created within its empire." [The Life Divine, p. 954]

 

p. 158  "The liberation from this pull of the Inconscience and a secured basis for a continuous divine or gnostic evolution would only be achieved by a descent of the Supermind into the terrestrial formula, bringing into it the supreme law and light and dynamis of the Spirit and penetrating with it and transforming the inconscience of the material basis." [The Life Divine, p. 955]

 

Supermind  (early Nondual)

 

p. 159  "In this supermind all is self-known self-luminously, there are no divisions, oppositions or separated aspects as in Mind whose principle is division of Knowledge into parts and setting each part against another.  Overmind approaches this at its top and is often mistaken for supermind, but it cannot reach it – except by uplifting and transformation." [Letters on Yoga, p. 260]

 

p. 160  "We call it the Supermind or Truth-Consciousness, because it is a principle superior to mentality and exists, acts and proceeds in the fundamental truth and unity of things and not like the mind in their appearances and phenomenal divisions." [The Life Divine, p. 143]

 

p. 161  "Even an incomplete statement made by the Supermind is a truth leading to a further truth, its incomplete action a step towards completeness." [The Supramental Manifestation and Other Writings, p. 42]

 

Sachchidananda – Existence-Consciousness-Bliss   (Nondual)

 

p. 161  "Sachchidananda is the One with a triple aspect.  In the Supreme the three are not three but one – existence is consciousness, consciousness is bliss, and they are thus inseparable, not only inseparable but so much each other that they are not distinct at all." [Letters on Yoga, p. 239]

 

p. 164  "When we advance in that ultra-normal self-knowledge and experience which Yoga brings with it, we become aware that the body too has a consciousness of its own;  it has habits, impulses, instincts, an inert yet effective will which differs from that of the rest of our being and can resist it and condition its effectiveness.  Much of the struggle in our being is due to this composite existence and the interaction of these varied and heterogeneous planes on each other.  For man here is the result of an evolution and contains in himself the whole of that evolution up from the merely physical and subvital conscious being to the mental creature which at the top he is." [The Synthesis of Yoga, p. 372]

 

p. 165-166       "For the universal is only the pouring out of the essential existence, consciousness and delight;  and wherever and in whatever form that manifests as existence, there the essential consciousness must be and therefore there must be an essential delight." [The Synthesis of Yoga, p. 373-374]

 

p. 166  "We have to realise the true self of ourselves and of all;  and to realise the true self is to realise Sachchidananda." [The Synthesis of Yoga, p. 374]