When he first read the Vedas — translated by Western Sanskritists or Indian pandits — they appeared to Sri Aurobindo as “an important document of [Indian] history, but seemed of scant value or importance for the history of thought or for a living spiritual experience.”1 Fifteen years later, however, Sri Aurobindo would re-read the Vedas in the original Sanskrit and find there “a constant vein of the richest gold of thought and spiritual experience.”2 Meanwhile, Sri Aurobindo had had certain “psychological experiences of my own for which I had found no sufficient explanation either in European psychology or in the teachings of Yoga or of Vedanta,” and which “the mantras of the Veda illuminated with a clear and exact light. . .”3 And it was through these experiences of his “own” that Sri Aurobindo came to discover, from within, the true meaning of the Vedas (and especially the most ancient of the four, the Rig-veda, which he studied with special care). What the Vedas brought him was no more than a confirmation of what he had received directly. But didn’t the Rishis themselves speak of “Secret words, clairvoyant wisdoms, that reveal their inner meaning to the seer” (Rig-veda IV, 3.16)?

It is not surprising, therefore, that exegetes have seen the Vedas primarily as a collection of propitiatory rites centered around sacrificial fires and obscure incantations to Nature divinities (water, fire, dawn, the moon, the sun, etc.), for bringing rain and rich harvests to the tribes, male progeny, blessings upon their journeys or protection against the “thieves of the sun” — as though these shepherds were barbarous enough to fear that one inauspicious day their sun might no longer rise, stolen away once and for all. Only here and there, in a few of the more “modern” hymns, was there the apparently inadvertent intrusion of a few luminous passages that might have justified — just barely — the respect which the Upanishads, at the beginning of recorded history, accorded to the Veda. In Indian tradition, the Upanishads had become the real Veda, the “Book of Knowledge,” while the Veda, product of a still stammering humanity, was a “Book of Works” — acclaimed by everyone, to be sure, as the venerable Authority, but no longer listened to. With Sri Aurobindo we might ask why the Upanishads, whose depth of wisdom the whole world has acknowledged, could claim to take inspiration from the Veda if the latter contained no more than a tapestry of primitive rites; or how it happened that humanity could pass so abruptly from these so-called stammerings to the manifold richness of the Upanishadic Age; or how we in the West were able to evolve from the simplicity of Arcadian shepherds to the wisdom of Greek philosophers. We cannot assume that there was “nothing between the early savage and Plato or the Upanishads”.4. . .

Nor was it insignificant that fire, Agni, was the core of the Vedic mysteries: Agni, the inner flame, the soul within us (for who can deny that the soul is fire?), the innate aspiration drawing man towards the heights; Agni, the ardent will within us that sees, always and forever, and remembers; Agni, “the priest of the sacrifice,” the “divine worker,” the “envoy between earth and heaven” (Rig-veda III, 3.2) “he is there in the middle of his house” (1.70.2). “The Fathers who have divine vision set him within as a child that is to be born” (IX.83.3). He is “the boy suppressed in the secret cavern” (V.2.1). “He is as if life and the breath of our existence, he is as if our eternal child” (I.66.1). “O Son of the body” (III.4.2), “O Fire, thou art the son of heaven by the body of the earth” (III.25. 1). “Immortal in mortals” (IV.2. 1), “old and outworn he grows young again and again” (11.4.5). “When he is born he becomes one who voices the godhead: when as life who grows in the mother he has been fashioned in the mother he becomes a gallop of wind in his movement” (III.29.11). “O Fire, when thou art well borne by us thou becomest the supreme growth and expansion of our being, all glory and beauty are in thy desirable hue and thy perfect vision. O Vastness, thou art the plenitude that carries us to the end of our way; thou art a multitude of riches spread out on every side” (II. 1. 12). “O Fire. . . brilliant ocean of light in which is divine vision” (III.22.2), “the Flame with his hundred treasures. . . O knower of all things born” (I.59).

But the divine fire is not our exclusive privilege — Agni exists not only in man: “He is the child of the waters, the child of the forests, the child of things stable and the child of things that move. Even in the stone he is there. . .” (I.70.2). . .

But we have not yet reached the heart of the Vedic secret. The birth of Agni, the soul (and so many men are still unborn) is merely the start of the voyage. This inner flame seeks, it is the seeker within us, for it is a spark of the great primordial Fire and will never be satisfied until it has recovered its solar totality, “the lost sun” of which the Veda incessantly speaks. Yet even when we have risen from plane to plane and the Flame has taken successive births in the triple world of our lower existence (the physical, vital and mental world), it will still remain unsatisfied — it wants to ascend, ascend further. And soon we reach a mental frontier where there seems to be nothing to grasp any longer, nor even to see, and nothing remains but to abolish everything and leap into the ecstasy of a great Light. At this point, we feel almost painfully the imprisoning carapace of matter all around us, preventing that apotheosis of the Flame; then we understand the cry, “My kingdom is not of this world,” and the insistence of India’s Vedantic sages — and perhaps the sages of all worlds and all religions — that we must abandon this body to embrace the Eternal. Will our flame thus forever be truncated here below and our quest always end in disappointment? Shall we always have to choose one or the other, to renounce earth to gain heaven? Yet beyond the lower triple world, the Rishis had discovered “a certain fourth,” turīaṁ svid; they found “the vast dwelling place,” “the solar world,” Swar: “I have arisen from earth to the mid-world [life], I have arisen from the mid-world to heaven [mind], from the level of the firmament of heaven I have gone to the Sun-world, the Light” (Yajur-veda 17.67). And it is said, “Mortals, they achieved immortality” (Rig-veda 1. 110.4). What then was their secret? How did they pass from a “heaven of mind” to the “great heaven” without leaving the body, without, as it were, going off into ecstasies?

The secret lies in matter. Because Agni is imprisoned in matter and we ourselves are imprisoned there. It is said that Agni is “without head or feet,” that it “conceals its two extremities”: above, it disappears into the “great heaven” of the supraconscient (which the Rishis also called “the great ocean”), and below, it sinks into the “formless ocean” of the inconscient (which they also called “the rock”). We are truncated. But the Rishis were men of a solid realism, a true realism resting upon the Spirit; and since the summits of mind opened out upon a lacuna of light — ecstatic, to be sure, but with no hold over the world – they set upon the downward way.

Thus begins the quest for the “lost sun,” the long “pilgrimage” of descent into the inconscient and the merciless fight against the dark forces, the “thieves of the sun,” the panis and vritras, pythons and giants, hidden in the “dark lair” with the whole cohort of usurpers: the dualizers, the confiners, the tearers, the coverers. But the “divine worker,” Agni, is helped by the gods, and in his quest he is led by the “intuitive ray,” Sarama, the heavenly hound with the subtle sense of smell who sets Agni on the track of the “stolen herds” (strange, “shining” herds). Now and again there comes the sudden glimmer of a fugitive dawn. . . then all grows dim. One must advance step by step, “digging, digging,” fighting every inch of the way against “the wolves” whose savage fury increases the nearer one draws to their den — Agni is a warrior. Agni grows through his difficulties, his flame burns more brilliantly with each blow from the Adversary; for, as the Rishis said, “Night and Day both suckled the divine Child”; they even said that Night and Day are the “two sisters, Immortal, with a common lover [the sun]. . . common they, though different their forms” (1. 113.2,3). These alternations of night and brightness accelerate until Day breaks at last and the “herds of Dawn” surge upward awakening “someone who was dead” (1. 113.8). “The infinite rock” of the inconscient is shattered, the seeker uncovers “the Sun dwelling in the darkness” (111.39.5), the divine consciousness in the heart of Matter. . . In the very depths of Matter, that is to say, in the body, on earth, the Rishis found themselves cast up into Light — that same Light which others sought on the heights, without their bodies and without the earth, in ecstasy. And this is what the Rishis would call “the Great Passage.” Without abandoning the earth they found “the vast dwelling place,” that “dwelling place of the gods,” Swar, the original Sun-world that Sri Aurobindo calls the Supramental World: “Human beings slaying the Coverer have crossed beyond both earth and heaven [matter and mind] and made the wide world their dwelling place” (1.36.8). They have entered “the True, the Right, the Vast,” Satyam, Ritam, Brihat, the “unbroken light,” the “fearless light,” where there is no longer suffering nor falsehood nor death: it is immortality, amṛtaṁ. . . .

All is reconciled. The Rishi is “the son of two mothers”: son of Aditi, the luminous cow, Mother of infinite Light, creatrix of the worlds; and son as well of Diti, the black cow, Mother of “the tenebrous infinite” and divided existence — for when Diti at last reaches the end of her apparent Night, she gives us divine birth and the milk of heaven. All is fulfilled, The Rishi “sets flowing in one movement human strengths and things divine” (IX.70.3), he has realized the universal in the individual, become the Infinite in the finite: “Then shall thy humanity become as if the workings of these gods; it is as if the visible heaven of light were founded in thee” (V.66.2). Far from spurning the earth, he prays: “O Godhead, guard for us the Infinite and lavish the finite” (IV.2.1 1).

The voyage draws to its close. Agni has recovered its solar totality, its two concealed extremities. “The inviolable work” is fulfilled. For Agni is the place where high meets low — and in truth, there is no longer high nor low, but a single Sun everywhere: “O Flame, thou goest to the ocean of Heaven, towards the gods; thou makest to meet together the godheads of the planes, the waters that are in the realm of light above the sun and the waters that abide below” (111.22.3). “O Fire. . . O universal Godhead, thou art the navel-knot of the earths and their inhabitants; all men born thou controllest and supportest like a pillar” (1.59.1). “O Flame, thou foundest the mortal in a supreme immortality. . . thou createst divine bliss and human joy” (1.31.7). For the world’s heart is Joy, Joy dwells in the depths of all things, “the well of honey covered by the rock” (11.24.4).

About the Author

Satprem passed away on April 9th, 2007 at the age of 84. Through his books, and particularly through his role in the publication of the 13 volumes of Mother’s Agenda, Satprem played a key role not only in introducing many people to the works of Sri Aurobindo and The Mother, but also in explaining the scope and significance of the great endeavor They had undertaken. The following brief biography is from Beyond the Human Species (Chapter 23, pp. 370–373) by Georges van Vrekhem.

Satprem, formerly named Bernard Enginger, is a Frenchman who was born in Paris in 1923, but who has always nostalgically remembered his youth on the coast of Brittany. In the Second World War he became a member of the Resistance. He had just turned twenty when the Gestapo arrested him; he spent one and a half years in German concentration camps. After the war, and deeply branded by those experiences, he became an exponent of the problematics and the life-view of Existentialism, although not Sartre and Camus but Gide and Malraux were the main sources of his inspiration. In 1946, he wrote in a letter to André Gide:

I loved you, and certain passages from your books have helped me to survive in the concentration camps. From you I got the force to break away from a bourgeois and material comfort. Together with you, I have been seeking “not so much for possession as for love.” I have made a clean sweep to stand completely new before the new law. I have made myself free. . . Finally, I have broken away from you, but I have found no new masters and life keeps suffocating me. The terrible absurdity of the likes of Sartre and Camus has solved nothing and only opens the gates to suicide. (André Gide, Journal 1942-1949).5

Satprem worked briefly as a functionary in the colonial administration of Pondicherry, but he felt dissatisfied and unfulfilled everywhere and went in search of adventure in French Guyana, Brazil and Africa.

However, when in Pondicherry he had had the darshan6 of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother, and he carried The Life Divine with him even in the rain forests of the Amazon. In 1953, after those wanderings, he returned to Pondicherry to meet the Mother and settle in the Ashram against his individualistic and rebellions nature.

Satprem’s first years in the [Sri Aurobindo] Ashram were a period of dissatisfaction, restlessness, doubts, and sometimes loudly voiced revolt. Time and again he imagined he had to find his inner fulfillment in adventure. There is not an exotic place on Earth he did not feel impelled to go to; the Congo, Brazil (again), Afghanistan, the Himalayas, New Zealand, the Gobi desert, a journey around the globe in a sailing boat — all that and more is dreamed of in his letters. But the Mother knew what was really prompting him and she let him become, in 1959, the disciple of a very able tantric yogi who was also the head priest of the big temple in Rameshwaram. Then, guided by another yogi, Satprem wandered during six months as a sannyāsī (mendicant monk) through India and received the initiation of the sannyāsīs. His novel By the Body of the Earth, or The Sannyasi is based on these experiences.

But “the bird always returned to the nest,” to the Ashram in Pondicherry, to the Mother. She started inviting him from time to time to her room, at first apparently for some literary chores in connection with the Bulletin.7 He became more and more spellbound by her. “At first, she had me called, and there was that big chair in which she was sitting, and I sat down on the carpet on the floor and listened to her. Truly, she knew so much. It was wonderful to listen to her. But most important, little by little she began telling her experience.”

The Mother had so much to communicate, to share, her knowledge and experience were so broad in all essential domains where the human being is confronted with “the great questions,” but so little was asked of her. “I am a little bell that is not sounded,” she said. Here now was a man with an analytical mind, a poignant life-experience and a thirst for knowledge — the ideal instrument to communicate to others a glimpse of her unbelievable adventure. Satprem started realizing the importance of those conversations with the Mother and took a tape-recorder to her room. Thus the Agenda came about.

Agenda, October 30, 1961

The day before and at the beginning of this conversation with The Mother, Satprem read aloud the above passages of his manuscript.

I had an experience while listening to you read; it was as if I heard, “The beginning of the legend. . . the beginning of the legend. . .”

It’s rather strange.

He [Sri Aurobindo] is there and the atmosphere is full of a sort of concentration of force, and there are these two things: “This is how legends come into being. . . how legends begin. . . The beginning of the legend. . .” I hear this. And there is also a kind of analogy to the old stories of Buddha, of Christ. . . It’s strange.

I seemed to be looking back into the present from some thousands of years ahead (it’s no longer now, but as if I were propelled somewhere several thousand years ahead, looking backwards) and it’s the beginning of the legend. [. . .]

Curious, this impression — the feeling of the body and the atmosphere when I was propelled into the future. It’s something more. . . more compact, denser than the physical: the New Creation. One always tends to think of it as something more ethereal, but it’s not! [. . .]

I got the impression of there being the same difference between the physical fact of Christ or the physical fact of Buddha — and everything we know and say and think and feel about them today — as there is between what we now know of Sri Aurobindo and what will be known of him in the time I was propelled into. This book was like the initiator of the legend.

These days, I don’t know whether it has come to the last battle, but it has descended very deep into the cells’ worst-lit realm: what still belongs most to the world of Unconsciousness and Inertia and is most foreign to the divine Presence. It is, so to say, the primal substance that was first used by Life, and it has a sort of inability to feel, to experience a reason for that life.

In fact, it’s something I had never experienced [this absence of meaning]; even in my earliest childhood, when there was no development, I always had a perception (not a mentalized but a vibrant perception) of a Power behind all things which is the raison d’être of all things — a Power, a Force, a kind of warmth.

It isn’t the experience of THIS body’s cells: it’s an identification with the world in general, with the Earth as a whole. It’s an absolutely frightful and hopeless condition: something meaningless, aimless, without raison d’être, without any joy in itself or ... and worse than disagreeable — meaningless, insensate. Something that has no raison d’être and yet is. It was ... it is a frightful situation.

I have an impression of being quite close to the bottom of the pit.

Yesterday, it was like that almost the whole day long. But all at once something came (I don’t know from where or how ... neither from above nor from within nor from ... I don’t know): there is only ONE raison d’être, only ONE Reality, only ONE Life, and there is nothing other than ... THAT. It was THAT (not in the least mentally, there was no intellectual formulation, nothing), it was Something that was Light (far more than Light), Power (far more than power), Omnipotence (far more than Omnipotence), and also an intensity of sweetness, of warmth, of plenitude — all that together — along with that Something, which naturally words cannot describe. And That came all at once, like that, when there was such a frightful state of anguish, because it was nothing — a nothing you couldn’t get out of. There was no way of getting out of that nothing, because it was nothing.

You know, all those who seek Nirvana, all their disgust of life, all that is almost enjoyable in comparison! That’s not it. That’s not it, it was a thousand times, a million times worse. It was nothing, and because it was nothing it was impossible to get out of it — there was no ... no solution.

At one point, the tension was so great that ... you wonder, “Am I going to burst?”

Then everything relaxed and opened up (gesture as if the cells opened out) ...

OM. (Silence)

I don’t know if there’s a yet deeper pit but.... And that relief, that blossoming, that peace ... Everything disappears, except That. (Silence)

It’s really the first time I had that experience — never, never did I experience that before. And it wasn’t in the least, in the least personal to my body, it isn’t my body’s cells — it’s something else....

And that is the basis and foundation of all materialism.

It lasted the whole day long! ... (Silence)

The experience came at the time when the condition was most acute in its nothingness.... I don’t know how to explain it, it’s inexpressible, but it was COMPLETE: there was nothing but that, that sort of meaningless and aimless “nothing,” without raison d’être or origin — and, therefore, without remedy. Then it reached the point when ... you know, when everything is about to burst and there is such a tension. (Is it tension? I don’t know how to explain.) And all at once, a change as total as you can imagine.

Related posts:

There remains one question that deserves to be answered in more detail. What exactly differentiates Sri Aurobindo’s integral monism from the dualistic architecture of Sankhya? There is of course the Purushottama, the Para Purusha, the Ishwara who encompasses and transcends the duality of Purusha and Prakriti. There is not only the lower Prakriti of the Sankhya but also the higher Para-Prakriti. And while Sankhya uses the soul’s sanction or assent as an off-switch to secure an escape from Nature, Sri Aurobindo turns it into a means or condition for ascent and transformation. But what precisely fills the Sankhya’s gap between Purusha and Prakriti, which in the Aurobindonian system becomes the space between “Spirit in which all is involved and out of which all evolves downward to the other pole of Matter” and “Matter in which also all is involved and out of which all evolves upward to the other pole of Spirit”? This way of putting the question gives away part of the answer: the two ends of creation are joined by a process by which Spirit gets involved in Matter, and which sets the stage for the Spirit’s adventure of evolution. But what is the nature of this process? On what mechanism does it rely? The answer in a word is: exclusive concentration of Consciousness-Force (Chit-Tapas). For more on this subject, watch this space.

You are now watching this space. What follows are excerpt from two chapters of The Life Divine, Book II: Chapters XII (The Origin of the Ignorance) and XIII (Exclusive Concentration of Consciousness-Force and the Ignorance). (Some paragraph breaks have been inserted to suit present-day attention spans.)

Absolute consciousness is in its nature absolute power; the nature of Chit is Shakti: Force or Shakti concentrated and energised for cognition or for action in a realising power effective or creative, the power of conscious being dwelling upon itself and bringing out, as it were, by the heat of its incubation1 the seed and development of all that is within it or, to use a language convenient to our minds, of all its truths and potentialities, has created the universe.

If we examine our own consciousness, we shall see that this power of its energy applying itself to its object is really the most positive dynamic force it has; by that it arrives at all its knowledge and its action and its creation. But for us there are two objects on which the dynamism within can act, ourselves, the internal world, and others, whether creatures or things, the external world around us. To Sachchidananda this distinction with its effective and operative consequences does not apply in the same way as for us, because all is himself and within himself and there is no such division as we make by the limitations of our mind. Secondly, in us only a part of the force of our being is identified with our voluntary action, with our will engaged in mental or other activity, the rest is to our surface mental awareness involuntary in its action or subconscient or superconscient, and from this division also a great number of important practical consequences emerge: but in Sachchidananda this division too and its consequences do not apply, since all is his one indivisible self and all action and result are movements of his one indivisible will, his consciousness-force in dynamic operation. Tapas is the nature of action of his consciousness as of ours, but it is the integral Tapas of an integral consciousness in an indivisible Existence.

In the infinity of being and its infinite awareness concentration of consciousness, Tapas, is always present as an inherent power of Consciousness-Force: it is a self-held or self-gathered dwelling of the eternal Awareness in itself and on itself or on its object; but the object is always in some way itself, its own being or a manifestation and movement of its being. The concentration may be essential; it may be even a sole indwelling or an entire absorption in the essence of its own being, a luminous or else a self-oblivious self-immersion. Or it may be an integral or else a total-multiple or a part-multiple concentration. Or it may be a single separative regard on one field of its being or movement, a single-pointed concentration in one centre or an absorption in one objective form of its self-existence. The first, the essential, is at one end the superconscient Silence and at the other end the Inconscience; the second, the integral, is the total consciousness of Sachchidananda, the supramental concentration; the third, the multiple, is the method of the totalising or global overmental awareness; the fourth, the separative, is the characteristic nature of the Ignorance. The supreme integrality of the Absolute holds all these states or powers of its consciousness together as a single indivisible being looking at all itself in manifestation with a simultaneous self-vision.

֎

An exclusive concentration on or in a single subject or object or domain of being or movement is not a denial or departure from the Spirit’s awareness, it is one form of the self-gathering of the power of Tapas. But when the concentration is exclusive, it brings about a holding back behind it of the rest of self-knowledge. It may be aware of the rest all the time, yet act as if it were not aware of it; that would not be a state or act of Ignorance: but if the consciousness erects by the concentration a wall of exclusion limiting itself to a single field, domain or habitation in the movement so that it is aware only of that or aware of all the rest as outside itself, then we have a principle of self-limiting knowledge which can result in a separative knowledge and culminate in a positive and effective ignorance.

We can get some glimpse of what this means, to what it amounts in action, when we look at the nature of exclusive concentration in mental man, in our own consciousness. First of all, we must note that what we mean ordinarily by the man is not his inner self, but only a sum of apparent continuous movement of consciousness and energy in past, present and future to which we give this name. It is this that in appearance does all the works of the man, thinks all his thoughts, feels all his emotions. This energy is a movement of Consciousness-Force concentrated on a temporal stream of inward and outward workings. But we know that behind this stream of energy there is a whole sea of consciousness which is aware of the stream, but of which the stream is unaware; for this sum of surface energy is a selection, an outcome from all the rest that is invisible.

That sea is the subliminal self, the superconscient, the subconscient, the intraconscient and circumconscient being, and holding it all together the soul, the psychic entity. The stream is the natural, the superficial man. In this superficial man Tapas, the being’s dynamic force of consciousness, is concentrated on the surface in a certain mass of superficial workings; all the rest of itself it has put behind and may be vaguely aware of it there in the unformulated back of its conscious existence, but is not aware of it in this superficial absorbed movement in front. It is not precisely, at any rate in that back or in the depths, ignorant of itself in any essential sense of the word, but for the purposes of its superficial movement and within that movement only it is oblivious of its real, its greater self, by absorption, by exclusive concentration on what it is superficially doing. Yet it is really the hidden sea and not the superficial stream which is doing all the action: it is the sea that is the source of this movement, not the conscious wave it throws up, whatever the consciousness of the wave, absorbed in its movement, living in that, seeing nothing else but that, may think about the matter. And that sea, the real self, the integral conscious being, the integral force of being, is not ignorant; even the wave is not essentially ignorant — for it contains within itself all the consciousness it has forgotten and but for that it could not act or endure at all — but it is self-oblivious, absorbed in its own movement, too absorbed to note anything else than the movement while that continues to preoccupy it. A limited practical self-oblivion, not an essential and binding self-ignorance, is the nature of this exclusive concentration which is yet the root of that which works as the Ignorance.

So too we see that man, though a really indivisible stream of Tapas, of conscious energy in Time, capable of acting in the present only by the sum of his past force of working, creating already his future by his past and his present action, yet lives absorbed in the present moment, lives from moment to moment, and is therefore in this superficial action of consciousness ignorant of his future and ignorant of his past except for that small part of it which at any moment he may recall to him by memory....

The true consciousness within is not unaware of its past; it holds it there, not necessarily in memory but in being, still active, living, ready with its fruits, and sends it up from time to time in memory or more concretely in result of past action or past causes to the superficial conscious being — that is indeed the true rationale of what is called Karma. It is or can be aware too of the future, for there is somewhere in the inner being a field of cognition open to future knowledge, a prospective as well as a retrospective Time-sense, Time-vision, Time-perception; something in it lives indivisibly in the three times and contains all their apparent divisions, holds the future ready for manifestation within it. Here, then, in this habit of living in the present, we have a second absorption, a second exclusive concentration which complicates and farther limits the being, but simplifies the apparent course of the action by relating it not to the whole infinite course of Time, but to a definite succession of moments.

Therefore in his superficial consciousness man is to himself dynamically, practically, the man of the moment, not the man of the past who once was but is no longer in existence, nor the man of the future who is not yet in being....

Yet because his real self is the true determinator and governs all secretly from behind, it is after all a knowledge behind which really determines the formed course of his existence; the superficial ignorance erects a necessary limiting outline and supplies the factors by which the outward colour and turn needed for his present human life and his present moment are given to his consciousness and his action. In the same way and for the same reason man identifies himself solely with the name and form he wears in his present existence; he is ignorant of his past before birth even as of his future after death. Yet all that he forgets is contained, present and effective, in the all-retaining integral consciousness within him.

There is a minor pragmatic use of exclusive concentration on the surface which may also give us an indication in spite of its temporary character. The superficial man living from moment to moment plays, as it were, several parts in his present life and, while he is busy with each part, he is capable of an exclusive concentration, an absorption in it, by which he forgets the rest of himself, puts it behind him for the moment, is to that extent self-oblivious. The man is for the moment the actor, the poet, the soldier or whatever else he may have been constituted and formed into by some peculiar and characteristic action of his force of being, his Tapas, his past conscious energy and by the action which develops from it. Not only is he apt to deliver himself up to this exclusive concentration in a part of himself for the time being, but his success in the action very largely depends on the completeness with which he can thus put aside the rest of himself and live only in his immediate work. Yet all the time we can see that it is the whole man who is really doing the action and not merely this particular part of him; what he does, the way he does it, the elements he brings into it, the stamp he gives to his work depends on his whole character, mind, information, genius, all that the past of him has made him — and not his past in this life only, but in other lives, and again not only his past, but the past, the present and the predestined future both of himself and the world around him are the determinants of his work. The present actor, poet or soldier in him is only a separative determination of his Tapas; it is his force of being organised for a particular kind of action of its energy, a separative movement of Tapas which is able — and this ability is not a weakness, a deficiency, but a great power of the consciousness — to absorb itself in that particular working to the temporary self-oblivion of the rest of itself, even though that rest is present all the time at the back of the consciousness and in the work itself and is active or has its influence in the shaping of the work.

This active self-oblivion of the man in his work and the part he plays, differs from the other, the deeper self-oblivion, in that the wall of separation is less phenomenally and not at all enduringly complete; the mind can dissolve its concentration and go back from its work at any time to the consciousness of the larger self of which this was a partial action. The superficial or apparent man cannot so go back at will to the real man within him; he can only do it to some extent abnormally or supernormally in exceptional conditions of his mentality or, more permanently and completely, as the fruit of a long and arduous self-training, self-deepening, self-heightening, self-expansion. Still he can go back; therefore the difference is phenomenal only, not essential: it is, in essence, in both cases the same movement of exclusive concentration, of absorption in a particular aspect of himself, action, movement of force, though with different circumstances and another manner of working.

֎

[I]n the larger universal consciousness there must be a power of carrying this movement to its absolute point, to the greatest extreme possible for any relative movement to reach, and this point is reached, not in human unconsciousness which is not abiding and always refers back to the awakened conscious being that man normally and characteristically is, but in the inconscience of material Nature. This inconscience is no more real than the ignorance of exclusive concentration in our temporary being which limits the waking consciousness of man; for as in us, so in the atom, the metal, the plant, in every form of material Nature, in every energy of material Nature, there is, we know, a secret soul, a secret will, a secret intelligence at work, other than the mute self-oblivious form, the Conscient — conscient even in unconscious things — of the Upanishad, without whose presence and informing conscious-force or Tapas no work of Nature could be done. What is inconscient there is the Prakriti, the formal, the motional action of the energy absorbed in the working, identified with it, to such an extent as to be bound in a sort of trance or swoon of concentration, unable to go back, while imprisoned in that form, to its real self, to the integral conscious being and the integral force of conscious being which it has put behind it, of which in its ecstatic trance of mere working and energy it has become oblivious. Prakriti, the executive Force, becomes unaware of Purusha, the Conscious Being, holds him hidden within herself and becomes again slowly aware only with the emergence of consciousness from this swoon of the Inconscience. Purusha indeed consents to assume the apparent form of itself which Prakriti constructs for it; it seems to become the Inconscient, the physical being, the vital being, the mental being: but in all these it remains still in reality itself; the light of the secret conscious Being supports and informs the action of the inconscient or emergingly conscious energy of Nature.

The inconscience is superficial like the ignorance of the waking human mind or the inconscience or subconscience of his sleeping mind, and within it is the All-conscient; it is entirely phenomenal, but it is the complete phenomenon. So complete is it that it is only by an impulsion of evolutionary consciousness emerging into other forms less imprisoned by this inconscient method of working that it can come back to itself, recover in the animal a partial awareness, then in man at his highest some possibility of approach to a first more complete though still superficial initiation of a truly conscious working. But still, as in the case of the superficial and the real man where there is also a similar though lesser inability, the difference is phenomenal only. Essentially, in the universal order of things, the inconscience of material Nature is the same exclusive concentration, the same absorption in the work and the energy as in the self-limitation of the waking human mind, or the concentration of the self-forgetting mind in its working; it is only that self-limitation carried to a farthest point of self-forgetfulness which becomes, not a temporary action, but the law of its action. Nescience in Nature is the complete self-ignorance; the partial knowledge and general ignorance of man is a partial self-ignorance marking in her evolutionary order a return towards self-knowledge: but both are and all ignorance is, when examined, a superficially exclusive self-forgetful concentration of Tapas, of the conscious energy of being in a particular line or section of its movement of which alone it is aware or which alone it seems to be on the surface.

֎

This being the root-nature of the Ignorance, a practical truth of a phenomenally but not really dividing, of a limiting and separative conscious energy absorbed in its works to the apparent forgetfulness of its integral and real self, we may answer the questions that arise of the why, the where and the how of this movement. The reason for the Ignorance, its necessity, becomes clear enough once we have seen that without it the object of the manifestation of our world would be impossible, could not be done at all, or not completely, or not in the way in which it should be and is done. Each side of the manifold Ignorance has its justification, which is only a part of the one general necessity. Man, living in his timeless being, could not have thrown himself into the stream of Time with that movement of subjection to its flux from moment to moment which is the nature of his present living. Living in his superconscient or subliminal self, he could not have worked out from the knot of his individual mentality the relations which he has to ravel and unravel with the world about him, or would have to do it in a radically different fashion. Living in the universal self and not in the egoistic separative consciousness, he could not evolve that separate action, personality, outlook from himself as the sole or the initial centre and point of reference which is the contribution of the ego-sense to the world-workings. He has to put on the temporal, the psychological, the egoistic ignorance in order to protect himself against the light of the infinite and the largeness of the universal, so as to develop behind this defence his temporal individuality in the cosmos. He has to live as if in this one life and put on the ignorance of his infinite past and his future: for otherwise, if the past were present to him, he could not work out his present selected relations with his environment in the way intended; his knowledge would be too great for him, it would necessarily alter the whole spirit and balance and form of his action. He has to live in the mind absorbed by this bodily life and not in the supermind; for otherwise all these protecting walls of ignorance created by the limiting, dividing, differentiating power of mind would not be built or would become too thin and transparent for his purpose.

That purpose for which all this exclusive concentration we call the Ignorance is necessary, is to trace the cycle of self-oblivion and self-discovery for the joy of which the Ignorance is assumed in Nature by the secret spirit. It is not that all cosmic manifestation would otherwise become impossible; but it would be a quite different manifestation from the one in which we live; it would be confined to the higher worlds of the divine Existence or to a typal non-evolving cosmos where each being lived in the whole light of its own law of nature, and this obverse manifestation, this evolving cycle, would be impossible. What is here the goal would be then the eternal condition; what is here a stage would be the perpetuated type of existence.

It is to find himself in the apparent opposites of his being and his nature that Sachchidananda descends into the material Nescience and puts on its phenomenal ignorance as a superficial mask in which he hides himself from his own conscious energy, leaving it self-forgetful and absorbed in its works and forms. It is in those forms that the slowly awaking soul has to accept the phenomenal action of an ignorance which is really knowledge awaking progressively out of the original nescience, and it is in the new conditions created by these workings that it has to rediscover itself and divinely transform by that light the life which is thus labouring to fulfil the purpose of its descent into the Inconscience. Not to return as speedily as may be to heavens where perfect light and joy are eternal or to the supracosmic bliss is the object of this cosmic cycle, nor merely to repeat a purposeless round in a long unsatisfactory groove of ignorance seeking for knowledge and never finding it perfectly — in that case the ignorance would be either an inexplicable blunder of the All-conscient or a painful and purposeless Necessity equally inexplicable — but to realise the Ananda of the Self in other conditions than the supracosmic, in cosmic being, and to find its heaven of joy and light even in the oppositions offered by the terms of an embodied material existence, by struggle therefore towards the joy of self-discovery, would seem to be the true object of the birth of the soul in the human body and of the labour of the human race in the series of its cycles. The Ignorance is a necessary, though quite subordinate term which the universal Knowledge has imposed on itself that that movement might be possible — not a blunder and a fall, but a purposeful descent, not a curse, but a divine opportunity. To find and embody the All-Delight in an intense summary of its manifoldness, to achieve a possibility of the infinite Existence which could not be achieved in other conditions, to create out of Matter a temple of the Divinity would seem to be the task imposed on the spirit born into the material universe.

The ignorance, we see, is not in the secret soul, but in the apparent Prakriti; nor does it belong to the whole of that Prakriti — it cannot, for Prakriti is the action of the All-conscient — but arises in some development from its original integrality of light and power. Where does that development take place, in what principle of being does it find its opportunity and starting-point? Not, certainly, in the infinite being, the infinite consciousness, the infinite delight which are the supreme planes of existence and from which all else derives or descends into this obscurer ambiguous manifestation. There it can have no place. Not in the supermind; for in the supermind the infinite light and power are always present even in the most finite workings, and the consciousness of unity embraces the consciousness of diversity. It is on the plane of mind that this putting back of the real self-consciousness becomes possible.

For mind is that power of the conscious being which differentiates and runs along the lines of differentiation with the sense of diversity prominent and characteristic and the sense of unity behind it only, not characteristic, not the very stuff of its workings. If by any chance this supporting sense of unity could be drawn back — it is possessed by mind not in its own separate right, but because it has the supermind behind it, because it reflects the light of the supermind of which it is a derivative and secondary power — if a veil could fall between mind and supermind shutting off the light of the Truth or letting it come through only in rays diffused, scattered, reflected but with distortion and division, then the phenomenon of the Ignorance would intervene. Such a veil exists, says the Upanishad, constituted by the action of Mind itself: it is in Over-mind a golden lid which hides the face of the supramental Truth but reflects its image; in Mind it becomes a more opaque and smoky-luminous coverture. That action is the absorbed looking downward of Mind on the diversity which is its characteristic movement and away from the supreme unity which that diversity expresses, until it forgets altogether to remember and support itself by the unity. Even then the unity supports it and makes its activities possible, but the absorbed Energy is unaware of its own origin and greater, real self. Since Mind forgets that from which it derived, because of absorption in the workings of formative Energy, it becomes so far identified with that Energy as to lose hold even on itself, to become totally oblivious in a trance of work which it still supports in its somnambulist action, but of which it is no longer aware. This is the last stage of the descent of consciousness, an abysmal sleep, a fathomless trance of consciousness which is the profound basis of the action of material Nature.

֎

[I]n order to remove the veil of the Ignorance the conscious Force of being in us uses a reverse action of its power of exclusive concentration; it quiets the frontal movement of Prakriti in the individual consciousness and concentrates exclusively on the concealed inner being — on the Self or on the true inner, psychic or mental or vital being, the Purusha — to disclose it. But when it has done so, it need not remain in this opposite exclusiveness; it can resume its integral consciousness or a global consciousness which includes both being of Purusha and action of Prakriti, the soul and its instruments, the Self and the dynamisms of the Self-Power, ātmaśakti: it can then embrace its manifestation with a larger consciousness free from the previous limitation, free from the results of Nature’s forgetfulness of the indwelling Spirit. Or it may quiet the whole working it has manifested, concentrate on a higher level of Self and Nature, raise the being to it and bring down the powers of the higher level to transform the previous manifestation: all that is so transformed is still included, but as a part of the higher dynamism and its higher values, in a new and greater self-creation. This is what can happen when the Consciousness-Force in our being decides to raise its evolution from the mental to the supramental level.

Purusha and Prakriti in the Sankhya system

“I am Kapila among the sages.” — Krishna to Arjuna, Bhagavad Gita

Sankhya is widely recognized as one of the oldest and most intellectually rigorous orthodox systems within the Indian philosophical tradition. The systematization of this school is generally attributed to Kapila, who is revered as its founder. Although his original writings have been lost, a lineage of successive scholars preserved and refined the system. This intellectual transmission culminated in the Sāṅkhyakārikā, composed by Ishvarakrishṇa between 350 and 450 CE, the earliest extant and authoritative textual resource of the school. To continue in Sri Aurobindo’s words, Sankhya explains existence...

...by two original principles whose inter-relation is the cause of the universe — Purusha, the inactive, Prakriti, the active. Purusha is the Soul, not in the ordinary or popular sense of the word, but of pure conscious Being immobile, immutable and self-luminous. Prakriti is Energy and its process. Purusha does nothing, but it reflects the action of Energy and its processes; Prakriti is mechanical, but by being reflected in Purusha it assumes the appearance of consciousness in its activities, and thus there are created those phenomena of creation, conservation, dissolution, birth and life and death, consciousness and unconsciousness, sense-knowledge and intellectual knowledge and ignorance, action and inaction, happiness and suffering which the Purusha under the influence of Prakriti attributes to itself although they belong not at all to itself but to the action or movement of Prakriti alone.

For Prakriti is constituted of three guṇas or essential modes of energy; sattwa, the seed of intelligence, conserves the workings of energy; rajas, the seed of force and action, creates the workings of energy; tamas, the seed of inertia and non-intelligence, the denial of sattwa and rajas, dissolves what they create and conserve. When these three powers of the energy of Prakriti are in a state of equilibrium, all is in rest, there is no movement, action or creation and there is therefore nothing to be reflected in the immutable luminous being of the conscious Soul. But when the equilibrium is disturbed, then the three gunas fall into a state of inequality in which they strive with and act upon each other and the whole inextricable business of ceaseless creation, conservation and dissolution begins, unrolling the phenomena of the cosmos. This continues so long as the Purusha consents to reflect the disturbance which obscures his eternal nature and attributes to it the nature of Prakriti; but when he withdraws his consent, the gunas fall into equilibrium and the soul returns to its eternal, unchanging immobility; it is delivered from phenomena. This reflection and this giving or withdrawal of consent seem to be the only powers of Purusha; he is the witness of Nature by virtue of reflection and the giver of the sanction.... Even his giving of consent is passive and his withdrawing of consent is only another passivity. All action subjective or objective is foreign to the Soul; it has neither an active will nor an active intelligence....

But whence then come this conscious intelligence and conscious will which we perceive to be so large a part of our being and which we commonly and instinctively refer not to the Prakriti, but to the Purusha? According to the Sankhya this intelligence and will are entirely a part of the mechanical energy of Nature and are not properties of the soul; they are the principle of Buddhi, one of the twenty-four tattvas, the twenty-four cosmic principles. Prakriti in the evolution of the world bases herself with her three gunas in her as the original substance of things, unmanifest, inconscient, out of which are evolved successively five elemental conditions of energy or matter — for Matter and Force are the same in the Sankhya philosophy. These are called by the names of the five concrete elements of ancient thought, ether, air, fire, water and earth; but it must be remembered that they are not elements in the modern scientific sense but subtle conditions of material energy and nowhere to be found in their purity in the gross material world. All objects are created by the combination of these five subtle conditions or elements. Again, each of these five is the base of one of five subtle properties of energy or matter, sound, touch, form, taste and smell, which constitute the way in which the mind-sense perceives objects. Thus by these five elements of Matter put forth from primary energy and these five sense relations through which Matter is known is evolved what we would call in modern language the objective aspect of cosmic existence.

Thirteen other principles constitute the subjective aspect of the cosmic Energy — Buddhi or Mahat, Ahankara, Manas and its ten sense-functions, five of knowledge, five of action. Manas, mind, is the original sense which perceives all objects and reacts upon them; for it has at once an inferent and an efferent activity, receives by perception what the Gita calls the outward touches of things, bāhya sparśa, and so forms its idea of the world and exercises its reactions of active vitality. But it specialises its most ordinary functions of reception by aid of the five perceptive senses of hearing, touch, sight, taste and smell, which make the five properties of things their respective objects, and specialises certain necessary vital functions of reaction by aid of the five active senses which operate for speech, locomotion, the seizing of things, ejection and generation.

Buddhi, the discriminating principle, is at once intelligence and will; it is that power in Nature which discriminates and coordinates. Ahankara, the ego-sense, is the subjective principle in Buddhi by which the Purusha is induced to identify himself with Prakriti and her activities. But these subjective principles are themselves as mechanical, as much a part of the inconscient energy as those which constitute her objective operations.... Sankhya explains what modern Science leaves in obscurity, the process by which the mechanical and inconscient takes on the appearance of consciousness. It is because of the reflection of Prakriti in Purusha; the light of consciousness of the Soul is attributed to the workings of the mechanical energy and it is thus that the Purusha, observing Nature as the witness and forgetting himself, is deluded with the idea generated in her that it is he who thinks, feels, wills, acts, while all the time the operation of thinking, feeling, willing, acting is conducted really by her and her three modes and not by himself at all. To get rid of this delusion is the first step towards the liberation of the soul from Nature and her works.

There are certainly plenty of things in our existence which the Sankhya does not explain at all or does not explain satisfactorily, but if all we need is a rational explanation of the cosmic processes in their principles as a basis for the great object common to the ancient philosophies, the liberation of the soul from the obsession of cosmic Nature, then the Sankhya explanation of the world and the Sankhya way of liberation seem as good and as effective as any other.

What we do not seize at first is why it should bring in an element of pluralism into its dualism by affirming one Prakriti, but many Purushas. It would seem that the existence of one Purusha and one Prakriti should be sufficient to account for the creation and procession of the universe. But the Sankhya was bound to evolve pluralism by its rigidly analytical observation of the principles of things. First, actually, we find that there are many conscious beings in the world and each regards the same world in his own way and has his independent experience of its subjective and objective things, his separate dealings with the same perceptive and reactive processes. If there were only one Purusha, there would not be this central independence and separativeness, but all would see the world in an identical fashion and with a common subjectivity and objectivity. Because Prakriti is one, all witness the same world; because her principles are everywhere the same, the general principles which constitute internal and external experience are the same for all; but the infinite difference of view and outlook and attitude, action and experience and escape from experience — a difference not of the natural operations which are the same but of the witnessing consciousness— are utterly inexplicable except on the supposition that there is a multiplicity of witnesses, many Purushas....

There is another difficulty quite as formidable. Liberation is the object set before itself by this philosophy as by others. This liberation is effected, we have said, by the Purusha’s withdrawal of his consent from the activities of Prakriti which she conducts only for his pleasure; but, in sum, this is only a way of speaking. The Purusha is passive and the act of giving or withdrawing consent cannot really belong to it, but must be a movement in Prakriti itself. If we consider, we shall see that it is, so far as it is an operation, a movement of reversal or recoil in the principle of Buddhi, the discriminative will. Buddhi has been lending itself to the perceptions of the mind-sense; it has been busy discriminating and coordinating the operations of the cosmic energy and by the aid of the ego-sense identifying the Witness with her works of thought, sense and action. It arrives by the process of discriminating things at the acid and dissolvent realisation that this identity is a delusion; it discriminates finally the Purusha from Prakriti and perceives that all is mere disturbance of the equilibrium of the gunas; the Buddhi, at once intelligence and will, recoils from the falsehood which it has been supporting and the Purusha, ceasing to be bound, no longer associates himself with the interest of the mind in the cosmic play. The ultimate result will be that Prakriti will lose her power to reflect herself in the Purusha; for the effect of the ego-sense is destroyed and the intelligent will becoming indifferent ceases to be the means of her sanction: necessarily then her gunas must fall into a state of equilibrium, the cosmic play must cease, the Purusha return to his immobile repose.

But if there were only the one Purusha and this recoil of the discriminating principle from its delusions took place, all cosmos would cease. As it is, we see that nothing of the kind happens. A few beings among innumerable millions attain to liberation or move towards it; the rest are in no way affected, nor is cosmic Nature in her play with them one whit inconvenienced by this summary rejection which should be the end of all her processes. Only by the theory of many independent Purushas can this fact be explained.... Here too we see that the multiplicity of souls is an inevitable conclusion from the data of the Sankhya analysis of existence. [EG 71‒76, Arya 15-3-17]

Purusha and Prakriti in the Integral Yoga

There are Two who are One and play in many worlds; 
In Knowledge and Ignorance they have spoken and met 
And light and darkness are their eyes’ interchange;
Our pleasure and pain are their wrestle and embrace, 
Our deeds, our hopes are intimate to their tale;
They are married secretly in our thought and life.
— Sri Aurobindo, Savitri

In Sri Aurobindo’s Letters on Yoga, there is a section titled “The Central Process of Yoga,” and in it there is a single letter. It begins by contrasting our real Self with what we normally regard as our self.

[T]his little mind, vital and body which we call ourselves is only a surface movement and not our “self” at all. It is an external bit of personality put forward for one brief life and for the play of the Ignorance. It is equipped with an ignorant mind stumbling about in search of fragments of truth, an ignorant vital rushing about in search of fragments of pleasure, an obscure and mostly subconscious physical receiving the impacts of things and suffering rather than possessing a resultant pain or pleasure. All that is accepted until the mind gets disgusted and starts looking about for the real Truth of itself and things, the vital gets disgusted and begins wondering whether there is not such a thing as real bliss and the physical gets tired and wants liberation from itself and its pains and pleasures. Then it is possible for this little ignorant bit of surface personality to get back to its real Self and with it to these greater things — or else to extinction of itself, Nirvana.

The real Self is not anywhere on the surface but deep within and above. Within is the soul supporting an inner mind, inner vital, inner physical in which there is a capacity for universal wideness and with it for the things now asked for — direct contact with the Truth of self and things, taste of a universal bliss, liberation from the imprisoned smallness and sufferings of the gross physical body.... It is, according to our psychology, connected with the small outer personality by certain centres of consciousness of which we become aware by Yoga.

Only a little of the inner being escapes through these centres into the outer life, but that little is the best part of ourselves and responsible for our art, poetry, philosophy, ideals, religious aspirations, efforts at knowledge and perfection. But the inner centres are, for the most part, closed or asleep — to open them and make them awake and active is one aim of Yoga. As they open, the powers and possibilities of the inner being also are aroused in us; we awake first to a larger consciousness and then to a cosmic consciousness; we are no longer little separate personalities with limited lives but centres of a universal action and in direct contact with cosmic forces. Moreover, instead of being unwilling playthings of the latter, as is the surface person, we can become to a certain extent conscious and masters of the play of nature — how far this goes depending on the development of the inner being and its opening upward to the higher spiritual levels. At the same time the opening of the heart centre releases the psychic being which proceeds to make us aware of the Divine within us and of the higher Truth above us.

Sri Aurobindo goes on to explain that the highest spiritual Self resides above the head, manifesting both as a static, detached Peace, which has the power to dissolve the ego, and as a dynamic cosmic force, which supports all universal action. Opening upward to this transcendent consciousness introduces an influx of Light, Power and Ananda. For this transformation to be safe, a stable foundation of Peace must first be established, for without it the external human nature cannot contain or endure the sheer intensity of these divine forces. Once Peace is secured, the Divine Force descends through the body’s energy centers — from the head down to the heart, navel, and base of the spine — to systematically liberate and restructure the mind, emotions, vital energies, and physical being. The letter continues:

All this is prepared, assisted, farthered by the work of the psychic being in the heart centre; the more it is open, in front, active, the quicker, safer, easier the working of the Force can be. The more love and bhakti and surrender grow in the heart, the more rapid and perfect becomes the evolution of the sadhana. For the descent and transformation imply at the same time an increasing contact and union with the Divine.

That is the fundamental rationale of the sadhana. It will be evident that the two most important things here are the opening of the heart centre and the opening of the mind centres to all that is behind and above them. For the heart opens to the psychic being and the mind centres open to the higher consciousness and the nexus between the psychic being and the higher consciousness is the principal means of the siddhi. The first opening is effected by a concentration in the heart, a call to the Divine to manifest within us and through the psychic to take up and lead the whole nature. Aspiration, prayer, bhakti, love, surrender are the main supports of this part of the sadhana — accompanied by a rejection of all that stands in the way of what we aspire for. The second opening is effected by a concentration of the consciousness in the head (afterwards, above it) and an aspiration and call and a sustained will for the descent of the divine Peace, Power, Light, Knowledge, Ananda into the being — the Peace first or the Peace and Force together....

The result of the concentration is not usually immediate.... The coming of the result can sometimes be aided by associating with the concentration one of the processes of the old Yogas. There is the Adwaita process of the way of knowledge — one rejects from oneself the identification with the mind, vital, body, saying continually “I am not the mind”, “I am not the vital”, “I am not the body”, seeing these things as separate from one’s real self — and after a time one feels all the mental, vital, physical processes and the very sense of mind, vital, body becoming externalised, an outer action, while within and detached from them there grows the sense of a separate self-existent being which opens into the realisation of the cosmic and transcendent Spirit. There is also the method — a very powerful method — of the Sankhyas, the separation of the Purusha and the Prakriti. One enforces on the mind the position of the Witness — all action of mind, vital, physical becomes an outer play which is not myself or mine, but belongs to Nature and has been enforced on an outer me. I am the witness Purusha who am silent, detached, not bound by any of these things. There grows up in consequence a division in the being; the sadhak feels within him the growth of a calm silent separate consciousness which feels itself quite apart from the surface play of the mind and the vital and physical Nature. Usually when this takes place, it is possible very rapidly to bring down the peace of the higher consciousness and the action of the higher Force and the full march of the Yoga. [LY III: 324‒29]

Purusha and Prakriti in Sri Aurobindo’s Integral Monism

Thus have they made their play with us for roles: 
Author and actor with himself as scene,
He moves there as the Soul, as Nature she.
— Sri Aurobindo, Savitri

Sankhya asserts that Prakriti’s movements are entirely driven by two specific purposes or goals: providing the soul with the grand theater of material existence to experience and enjoy life, and serving as the vehicle for the soul’s ultimate liberation. By presenting the soul with limitations and suffering, Prakriti eventually drives the soul to realize its complete independence from matter.

While providing an incredibly useful psychological scaffold for personal liberation, as a metaphysical system Sankhya leaves many questions unanswered or even unanswerable. What gives Prakriti the power to ensnare the soul, and what gives the soul the power to uphold or assent to her play? If Purusha is pure, immutable, and actionless consciousness, and Prakriti is entirely unconscious, mechanical energy, who pulls the trigger on the first glance? If the actual mechanics of witnessing — the cognitive processing of sight, the sensory focusing, the vital reaction, the emotional evaluation — take place entirely within Prakriti’s domain, how can the Purusha be the one that witnesses? How does Nature construct her psychological trap?

According to Sankhya, the mechanical instruments of Nature become conscious by reflecting the light of the Spirit like a mirror, yet every relation between two entities, including the reflection of one by the other, seems impossible without their prior identity. If Prakriti is able to mimic awareness because of the Buddhi’s “proximity” to the Purusha, as Sankhya claims, how does one measure or define the distance between the two? Ditto if it the claim is that the evolution of the manifest universe is triggered by the nearness of the Purusha to Prakrti, which “disturbs” the equilibrium of the Gunas in her unmanifest state (Avyakta).

Let us now see how the duality of Purusha-Prakriti fits into the Integral Monism of Sri Aurobindo. In The Life Divine, Book One, Sri Aurobindo discusses the three aspects of Sachchidananda in Chapters IX, X, and XI‒XII, respectively. Chapter IX (“The Pure Existent,” sat) closes with a question, to which Chapter X (“Conscious Force,” cit) provides the answer.

We have seen what pure Reason, intuition and experience have to say about pure Existence, about Sat; what have they to say about Force, about Movement, about Shakti? And the first thing we have to ask ourselves is whether that Force is simply force, simply an unintelligent energy of movement or whether the consciousness which seems to emerge out of it in this material world we live in, is not merely one of its phenomenal results but rather its own true and secret nature. In Vedantic terms, is Force simply Prakriti, only a movement of action and process, or is Prakriti really power of Chit, in its nature force of creative self-conscience? On this essential problem all the rest hinges. [LD 85‒86]

Restating the triune nature of Sachchidananda at the beginning of Chapter XII, Sri Aurobindo mentions an aspect of his philosophical project, which is to reconcile “the divergent formulae of the old philosophies”:

The self of things is an infinite indivisible existence; of that existence the essential nature or power is an infinite imperishable force of self-conscious being; and of that self-consciousness the essential nature or knowledge of itself is, again, an infinite inalienable delight of being.... As we look at these three aspects of essential Being, one in reality, triune to our mental view, separable only in appearance, in the phenomena of the divided consciousness, we are able to put in their right place the divergent formulae of the old philosophies so that they unite and become one, ceasing from their agelong controversy.

For if we regard world-existence only in its appearances and only in its relation to pure, infinite, indivisible, immutable Existence, we are entitled to regard it, describe it and realise it as Maya.... If, on the other hand, we look at world-existence in relation to consciousness only and to force of consciousness, we may regard, describe and realise it as a movement of Force obeying some secret will or else some necessity imposed on it by the very existence of the Consciousness that possesses or regards it. It is then the play of Prakriti, the executive Force, to satisfy Purusha, the regarding and enjoying Conscious-Being or it is the play of Purusha reflected in the movements of Force and with them identifying himself....

Again if we look at World-Existence rather in its relation to the self-delight of eternally existent being, we may regard, describe and realise it as Lila, the play, the child’s joy, the poet’s joy, the actor’s joy, the mechanician’s joy of the Soul of things eternally young, perpetually inexhaustible, creating and re-creating Himself in Himself for the sheer bliss of that self-creation, of that self-representation — Himself the play, Himself the player, Himself the playground. These three generalisations of the play of existence in its relation to the eternal and stable, the immutable Sachchidananda, starting from the three conceptions of Maya, Prakriti and Lila and representing themselves in our philosophical systems as mutually contradictory philosophies, are in reality perfectly consistent with each other, complementary and necessary in their totality to an integral view of life and the world. [LD 108‒11]

In Chapter II of Book Two (“Brahman, Purusha, Ishwara — Maya, Prakriti, Shakti”), Sri Aurobindo discusses a closely related triad of dualities. There is a realization where Brahman the Reality is experienced as “an immobile immutable being, self-existent, pervading the whole universe, omnipresent in all, but not dynamic or active, aloof from the ever mobile energy of Maya”.1 There is another realization of Brahman as...

...the Purusha, separate from Prakriti, the Conscious Being standing back from the activities of Nature. But this is an exclusive concentration which limits itself to a spiritual status and puts away from it all activity in order to realise the freedom of Brahman the self-existent Reality from all limitation by its own action and manifestation: it is an essential realisation, but not the total realisation. For we can see that the Conscious-Power, the Shakti that acts and creates, is not other than the Maya or all-knowledge of Brahman; it is the Power of the Self; Prakriti is the working of the Purusha, Conscious Being active by its own Nature: the duality then of Soul and World-Energy, silent Self and the creative Power of the Spirit, is not really something dual and separate, it is biune....

As the aspect of Self is in its essential character transcendental even when involved and identified with its universal and individual becomings, so the Purusha aspect is characteristically universal-individual and intimately connected with Nature even when separated from her. For this conscious Spirit while retaining its impersonality and eternity, its universality, puts on at the same time a more personal aspect; it is the impersonal-personal being in Nature from whom it is not altogether detached, for it is always coupled with her: Nature acts for the Purusha and by its sanction, for its will and pleasure; the Conscious Being imparts its consciousness to the Energy we call Nature, receives in that consciousness her workings as in a mirror, accepts the forms which she, the executive cosmic Force, creates and imposes on it, gives or withdraws its sanction from her movements.

The experience of Purusha-Prakriti, the Spirit or Conscious Being in its relations to Nature, is of immense pragmatic importance; for on these relations the whole play of the consciousness depends in the embodied being. If the Purusha in us is passive and allows Nature to act, accepting all she imposes on him, giving a constant automatic sanction, then the soul in mind, life, body, the mental, vital, physical being in us, becomes subject to our nature, ruled by its formation, driven by its activities; that is the normal state of our ignorance. If the Purusha in us becomes aware of itself as the Witness and stands back from Nature, that is the first step to the soul’s freedom; for it becomes detached, and it is possible then to know Nature and her processes and in all independence, since we are no longer involved in her works, to accept or not to accept, to make the sanction no longer automatic but free and effective; we can choose what she shall do or not do in us, or we can stand back altogether from her works and withdraw into the Self’s spiritual silence, or we can reject her present formations and rise to a spiritual level of existence and from there re-create our existence. The Purusha can cease to be subject, anīśa, and become lord of its nature, īśvara.

In the philosophy of the Sankhyas we find developed most thoroughly the metaphysical idea of Purusha-Prakriti. These two are eternally separate entities, but in relation to each other. Prakriti is Nature-power, an executive Power, it is Energy apart from Consciousness; for Consciousness belongs to the Purusha, Prakriti without Purusha is inert, mechanical, inconscient. Prakriti develops as its formal self and basis of action primal Matter and in it manifests life and sense and mind and intelligence; but intelligence too, since it is part of Nature and its product in primal Matter, is also inert, mechanical, inconscient — a conception which sheds a certain light on the order and perfectly related workings of the Inconscient in the material universe: it is the light of the soul, the Spirit, that is imparted to the mechanical workings of sense-mind and intelligence, they become conscious by its consciousness, even as they become active only by the assent of the spirit. The Purusha becomes free by drawing back from Prakriti; it becomes master of her by refusing to be involved in Matter. Nature acts by three principles, modes or qualities of its stuff and its action, which in us become the fundamental modes of our psychological and physical substance and its workings, the principle of inertia, the principle of kinesis and the principle of balance, light and harmony: when these are in unequal motion, her action takes place; when they fall into equilibrium she passes into quiescence. Purusha, conscious being, is plural, not one and single, while Nature is one: it would seem to follow that whatever principle of oneness we find in existence belongs to Nature, but each soul is independent and unique, sole to itself and separate whether in its enjoyment of Nature or its liberation from Nature.

All these positions of the Sankhya we find to be perfectly valid in experience when we come into direct inner contact with the realities of individual soul and universal Nature; but they are pragmatic truths and we are not bound to accept them as the whole or the fundamental truth either of self or of Nature. Prakriti presents itself as an inconscient Energy in the material world, but, as the scale of consciousness rises, she reveals herself more and more as a conscious force and we perceive that even her inconscience concealed a secret consciousness; so too conscious being is many in its individual souls, but in its self we can experience it as one in all and one in its own essential existence. Moreover, the experience of soul and Nature as dual is true, but the experience of their unity has also its validity. If Nature or Energy is able to impose its forms and workings on Being, it can only be because it is Nature or Energy of Being and so the Being can accept them as its own; if the Being can become lord of Nature, it must be because it is its own Nature which it had passively watched doing its work, but can control and master; even in its passivity its consent is necessary to the action of Prakriti and this relation shows sufficiently that the two are not alien to each other. The duality is a position taken up, a double status accepted for the operations of the self-manifestation of the being; but there is no eternal and fundamental separateness and dualism of Being and its Consciousness-Force, of the Soul and Nature.

It is the Reality, the Self, that takes the position of the Conscious Being regarding and accepting or ruling the works of its own Nature. An apparent duality is created in order that there may be a free action of Nature working itself out with the support of the Spirit and again a free and masterful action of the Spirit controlling and working out Nature. This duality is also necessary that the Spirit may be at any time at liberty to draw back from any formation of its Nature and dissolve all formation or accept or enforce a new or a higher formation....

The Purusha aspect and the Prakriti aspect go always together and whatever status Nature or Consciousness-force in action assumes, manifests or develops, there is a corresponding status of the Spirit. In its supreme status the Spirit is the supreme Conscious Being, Purushottama, and the Consciousness-Force is his supreme Nature, Para-Prakriti. In each status of the gradations of Nature, the Spirit takes a poise of its being proper to that gradation; in Mind-Nature it becomes the mental being, in Life-Nature it becomes the vital being, in nature of Matter it becomes the physical being, in supermind it becomes the Being of Knowledge; in the supreme spiritual status it becomes the Being of Bliss and pure Existence. In us, in the embodied individual, it stands behind all as the psychic Entity, the inner Self supporting the other formulations of our consciousness and spiritual existence.... But it is evident that whatever the posture taken or relation formed in any individual nodus of Purusha-Prakriti, the Being is in a fundamental cosmic relation lord or ruler of its nature: for even when it allows Nature to have its own way with it, its consent is necessary to support her workings.

This comes out in its fullest revelation in the third aspect of the Reality, the Divine Being who is the master and creator of the universe. Here the supreme Person, the Being in its transcendental and cosmic consciousness and force, comes to the front, omnipotent, omniscient, the controller of all energies, the Conscious in all that is conscient or inconscient, the Inhabitant of all souls and minds and hearts and bodies, the Ruler or Overruler of all works, the Enjoyer of all delight, the Creator who has built all things in his own being, the All-Person of whom all beings are personalities, the Power from whom are all powers, the Self, the Spirit in all, by his being the Father of all that is, in his Consciousness-Force the Divine Mother, the Friend of all creatures, the All-blissful and All-beautiful of whom beauty and joy are the revelation, the All-Beloved and All-Lover. In a certain sense, so seen and understood, this becomes the most comprehensive of the aspects of the Reality, since here all are united in a single formulation; for the Ishwara is supracosmic as well as intracosmic; He is that which exceeds and inhabits and supports all individuality; He is the supreme and universal Brahman, the Absolute, the supreme Self, the supreme Purusha.... Ishwara is Brahman the Reality, Self, Spirit, revealed as possessor, enjoyer of his own self-existence, creator of the universe and one with it, Pantheos, and yet superior to it, the Eternal, the Infinite, the Ineffable, the Divine Transcendence. [LD 361‒67]

Exclusive concentration

There remains one question that deserves to be answered in more detail. What exactly differentiates Sri Aurobindo’s integral monism from the dualistic architecture of Sankhya? There is of course the Purushottama, the Para Purusha, the Ishwara who encompasses and transcends the duality of Purusha and Prakriti. There is not only the lower Prakriti of the Sankhya but also the higher Para-Prakriti. And while Sankhya uses the soul’s sanction or assent as an off-switch to secure an escape from Nature, Sri Aurobindo turns the same into a means or condition for ascent and transformation. But what precisely fills the Sankhya’s gap between Purusha and Prakriti, which in the Aurobindonian system becomes the space between “Spirit in which all is involved and out of which all evolves downward to the other pole of Matter” and “Matter in which also all is involved and out of which all evolves upward to the other pole of Spirit” [LD 137]? This way of putting the question gives away part of the answer: the two ends of creation are joined by a process by which Spirit gets involved in Matter, and which sets the stage for the Spirit’s adventure of evolution. But what is the nature of this process? On what mechanism does it rely? The answer in a word is: exclusive concentration of Consciousness-Force (Chit-Tapas). For more on this subject, watch this space.

The following AI summary is for those who don’t have the time to read this post by Claire Berlinski. The others are encouraged to skip this summary and click or tap on this link.

1. The Farmer’s Dilemma

In the spring of 2026, a farmer in Northeast England, just south of the Scottish border, found himself paralyzed by a choice that was once routine but had become existential. Leaving a comment on Peter Zeihan’s site, he articulated the exact anxiety of a system in failure: Should he plant his spring crop? If he did, would he have enough fertilizer? And even if the crop grew, would the skyrocketing price of diesel make it impossible to ferry that harvest to market? This farmer was not a marginal anecdote; he was a leading indicator. His paralysis represents the breakdown of the fundamental confidence required for a modern economy to function. The loadings collapse we saw in early July 2026 is merely the physical manifestation of a deeper crisis: the transition from a world of manageable market fluctuations to one of cascading, nonlinear failures in a tightly coupled system.

2. The “Everything” Chokepoint: It’s Not Just About Oil

Conventional analysts treat the Strait of Hormuz as a simple volume-and-price problem for crude oil. This misunderstands the geography of modern production. Hormuz is the primary conduit for the specialized inputs that maintain the physical world. In 2025, more than 110 billion cubic meters of LNG passed through the Strait—nearly one-fifth of the world’s supply—with no realistic alternative route. Historically, a third of all internationally traded fertilizer passes through this single point of failure. When daily flows dropped from 20 million barrels to just 2.7 million between March and May 2026, the results were not parallel; they were recursive. We are seeing a network of “order effects”:

• First-Order: Spike in fertilizer costs and diesel scarcity.

• Second-Order: Farmers planting less or hedging poorly due to price volatility.

• Third-Order: Falling yields, higher food prices, and a tightening of global credit.

• Fourth-Order: Government hoarding, export bans, and the erosion of liberal democratic legitimacy. “The global economy was built for an age of abundance. It assumed cheap energy, cheap capital, cheap fertilizer, cheap transport, and geopolitical predictability. That system is breaking. If the Strait of Hormuz stays closed, it just might be the final straw.”

3. The Diesel Trap: Why Molecules in the Ground Won’t Save Us

There is a counter-intuitive truth that the “muddle-through” school of thought often ignores: a shortage of crude molecules is far less dangerous than the shortage of refined products. As the saying goes, “crude in the ground isn’t gasoline in Novosibirsk or diesel in a tractor.” The world is currently caught in a refinery trap, exacerbated by the crisis in Russia. Despite its vast reserves, Russia’s gasoline output has dropped to about 65 percent of domestic demand following successful strikes on its infrastructure. The global diesel market abruptly lost approximately 600,000 barrels a day just as Gulf exports were disrupted. On July 8, US diesel futures jumped 11 percent, and European gasoil’s1 premium over Brent reached a record $60.77 a barrel. This is where the energy crisis becomes a food crisis. The strategist must understand a crucial biological reality: late fertilizer is not the same as fertilizer. Because fertilizer must be applied at specific growth stages, supply chain delays are biologically final. You cannot retroactively feed a plant’s childhood. When diesel prices prevent the movement of bulk fertilizer—which moves in 50,000-tonne shiploads, not “artisanal caravans of trucks”—the yields are lost forever.

4. The Ghost of Resilience: We Are Currently Burning the Padding

My colleague Dan argues that modern markets are adaptive and that we will muddle through. This optimism is based on an illusion: we have deferred the shock by exhausting our “Hidden Buffers.” We are practicing “armored globalization”—a sandbagged, state-managed version of trade that feels resilient only because we are liquidating our security. The “brutal arithmetic” of the IEA and EIA data reveals the depth of this exhaustion:

• The Global Draw: Inventories have been drawing at an average of 3.8 million barrels per day since the conflict began.

• OECD Depletion: Government inventories are down 163 million barrels, reaching their lowest level since December 1990.

• The US SPR: The Strategic Petroleum Reserve has fallen to 319.5 million barrels—its lowest level since 1983.While IEA rules mandate 90 days of net imports, the US SPR now represents roughly sixteen days of supply. We are not just running out of molecules; we are running out of “cheap reassurance.” If a renewed disruption hits the earlier peak loss of 14 million barrels per day, our remaining cushion contracts to approximately 71 days.

5. The High-Tech Achilles Heel: Qatari Helium and the Chip Crisis

The most dangerous bottlenecks are “vascular insults” to markets too technical for mainstream notice. Advanced chipmaking (TSMC) and modern medicine depend on a cluster of fragile inputs—neon, argon, and semiconductor-grade helium. Qatar is home to one of only two plants in the world capable of producing helium at the required purity. The helium market is small, opaque, and non-negotiable. Unlike oil, if the cooling systems for superconducting magnets in MRI machines or NMR systems fail due to a lack of helium, the physical equipment damage is often catastrophic. Recovery for such high-purity supply chains could take a year or more. We are counting on AI to offset the energy shock, yet the very chips required for AI are hostage to the same chokepoint.

6. The “Omnishambles” Multiplier: Leadership as a Feedback Loop

In complexity theory, a “polycrisis” (Tooze) occurs when disparate crises interact. This is compounded by the “omnishambles” (Farrell)—a state of governmental disorder where policy-making becomes an endogenous source of uncertainty. The Trump administration’s erratic signaling acts as a contaminant in the system. We are facing three distinct layers of uncertainty:

1. Physical: Will the cargo arrive?

2. Price: At what cost?

3. Rule: What is permitted or sanctioned?”Rule Uncertainty” is the most toxic; it prevents insurers from pricing risk, which stops ships even if the water is technically “open.” This creates a War-Market Feedback Loop: military escalation leads to shipping risk premiums, which drive up fuel prices, creating political pressure for even more coercive—and potentially catastrophic—escalation. This is mirrored by the Economic-Political Feedback Loop, where domestic subsidies and export bans meant to soothe public anger actually deepen the aggregate international shortage.

7. Conclusion: The Historian’s Perspective

As we look toward the winter of 2026-27, the system is operating entirely on nerves. We face three distinct futures:

• Force: Attempting to smash Iranian capacity to restore transit, a task easier started than finished.

• Mediation: A narrow maritime deconfliction arrangement. We see the first signs of this in Oman, which has recently floated a “voluntary fee system” for navigation services—effectively a mediated toll.

• Full Economic Warfare: Strikes on civilian infrastructure and the end of the Gulf’s role as a shock absorber. The modern economy depends on the confidence that scarcity is a temporary, priceable problem. If Hormuz remains unusable, that confidence evaporates. A historian in 2040 may well look back at July 2026 as the “perishing of the old order”—the moment the system ran out of the slack necessary to survive its own complexity. Can a global order survive when its primary coordinator has become its primary source of disorder?

Then there is this piece from 2022 on Sri Aurobindo’s definition of yoga:

Finally there is this post on Sri Aurobindo’s own introduction to Yoga:

Share Aurocafe

Subscribe now

Leave a comment

Vedantum

Yoga Sūtra 1.2: Citta-Vṛtti-Nirodha

I. The Restlessness We Call Normal…

Read more

a month ago · Chandan Priyadarshi

Here are the first six sections:

I. The Restlessness We Call Normal

Notice what happens in the first unoccupied minute of a day. Before the day has asked anything of you, before any task has arrived to justify attention, something in the mind is already elsewhere. It has gone forward into a conversation that has not yet happened, or backward into one that ended badly a week ago. It has drifted toward hunger, toward an unfinished obligation, toward a face it has no reason to be thinking of at this hour. This movement rarely announces itself as a problem. It simply feels like what a mind does, the way breathing is what lungs do.

Patañjali (पतञ्जलि) does not treat this as ordinary. He treats it as the thing to be examined. The Yogasūtra opens without preamble, without any account of why the practice matters or what it promises. Atha yogānuśāsanam (YS 1:1), now, the teaching of yoga, and then, in the very next line, a definition offered as though it were simply a fact about the world rather than a claim requiring persuasion.

Four words, if the compounds are opened. Yoga (योग) is the nirodha (निरोध) , the stilling, of the vṛttis (वृत्ति) , the movements, of citta (चित्त), the mind. It reads almost too simply to be the foundation of an entire discipline. What, exactly, is being diagnosed here — and what, exactly, would it mean for the diagnosis to resolve?

II. A Diagnosis, Not a Doctrine

It is worth being precise about what kind of statement this is, because the imprecision here has caused real confusion. Yogaḥ citta-vṛtti-nirodhaḥ is not a theological claim. It does not ask the reader to accept anything about the soul, about God, about the ultimate structure of the cosmos, before the sentence can be tested. It is closer to a diagnosis: an exact naming of a condition, together with a description of what would have to change for that condition to resolve. A diagnosis does not require belief. It requires accurate observation, which is a different and more modest thing.

This distinction matters because yoga is frequently received as a creed, a set of propositions about reality that must be accepted before practice can properly begin. Patañjali does not build the Yogasūtra this way. The opening sutras establish a working description of a psychological condition and a working account of its resolution, prior to and independent of whatever larger metaphysical architecture the later portions of the text will build on top of it.

And it can be tested directly. Sit for a few minutes and watch where attention actually goes. It rarely stays where it is placed. It runs ahead into anticipated exchanges, doubles back into ones already finished, drifts toward some unrelated appetite or irritation, and returns to the present only when something sufficiently forceful calls it back. This is not an occasional lapse. For most people, most of the time, it is closer to the default condition of the mind. Patañjali has a name for this movement: vṛtti. And his claim is that yoga is what happens when it settles.

III. What Is Citta (चित्त)?

Citta is usually translated as mind, which is workable but loses something. In the psychological framework Patañjali inherits, the inner apparatus is not a single undifferentiated organ. Manas (मन) is the sensory mind, the faculty that receives and organises what the senses report. Buddhi (बुद्धि) is the discriminating intellect, the capacity that judges, decides, distinguishes one thing from another. Ahaṅkāra (अहंकार) is the ego-function, the operation that claims experience as mine and stitches together the sense of being a continuous someone. Citta (चित्त), in this framework, names the field on which manas, buddhi, and ahaṅkāra do their work, and on which the residues of that work settle and accumulate over time.

The distinction is not academic hairsplitting. It changes what the sutra is actually asking for. If citta simply meant the thinking faculty, then citta-vṛtti-nirodha would mean something close to the cessation of thought altogether, and this misunderstanding has done real damage to how the sutra gets practised. People attempt to force mental blankness, treat every arising thought as evidence of failure, and eventually abandon the effort as either unachievable or pointless.

But citta, understood as the field on which mental activity registers, is not eliminated by nirodha. What settles is the movement across that field, not the field’s basic capacity to register anything at all. The field that yoga works upon, then, is citta itself — and what it works upon within that field is vṛtti.

IV. What Is Vṛtti (वृत्ति)?

Vṛtti comes from a root meaning to turn, to whirl — the same image that describes the ripple spreading outward when a stone lands in still water. In daily life this movement rarely feels like a discrete “thought.” It feels more like a continuous pull: attention picked up and carried before any decision to be carried has been made. A remark from the morning replays itself at midday, uninvited. A minor uncertainty about tomorrow surfaces every few minutes, contributing nothing useful on any single occasion, and yet returning anyway. This is vṛtti at its most ordinary — not exotic mental content, but the habitual, compulsive re-arising of the same patterns, each one briefly commanding attention as though it were new.

What makes vṛtti worth naming separately from thought in general is this compulsive quality. A thought that arises, is seen clearly, and passes is not quite the difficulty Patañjali is pointing at. The difficulty is identification — the mind not merely having the thought but being carried by it, mistaking the ripple for the whole of the water. If vṛtti is this kind of movement, the natural question follows: what would it mean for such movement to stop, and would that stopping have to be forced?

V. Nirodha (निरोध) Is Not Suppression

This is where nearly every modern misunderstanding of yoga actually begins. Nirodha is often rendered as suppression or control, both carrying the implication of one part of the mind forcibly overpowering another. This reading has real consequences, and they are not good ones. Suppression treats the vṛtti as an enemy to be defeated by an act of will — but an act of will is itself a vṛtti, one movement of the mind attempting to overpower another. The result, at best, is a temporary and exhausting truce. The moment vigilance relaxes, the same patterns return, sometimes strengthened by the very effort spent resisting them.

Vyāsa’s classical commentary offers a more workable frame. He does not describe citta as having two possible conditions, agitated or stilled, with nothing of interest between. He describes a continuum, and nirodha as a direction of movement along it rather than a switch thrown all at once. Nirodha is not the abrupt cessation of all mental activity through force. It is the settling that occurs when the causes of turbulence are addressed at their source — closer to the way a disturbed pond clears, not because someone has stilled the water by hand, but because the sediment has been given time to settle and the wind troubling the surface has genuinely died down.

This is what the very next sutra promises. Tadā draṣṭuḥ svarūpe’vasthānam — then the seer abides in its own nature. The word tadā, then, carries real weight. It signals a consequence, not a separately achieved goal. Once the turbulence has settled, something is disclosed that did not need to be built. It only needed the noise to quiet enough to be noticed. What that abiding fully means belongs to later stages of the text. What matters here is only that settling, not suppression, is what produces it — and that settling is not uniform. It has recognisable gradations.

VI. The Five Conditions of Citta

Vyāsa names five conditions of citta, and each is worth taking on its own terms.

Mūḍha (मूढ़)

मूढ़म् - तमसा निद्रादिवृत्तिमत्;

mūḍham — tamasā nidrādi-vṛttimat;

“Mūḍha is that which is characterised by tamas, possessing modifications such as sleep.”

Mūḍha is the dullest condition — heavy with sleep, lethargy, fear, and confusion, its cause named as kāma, krodha, lobha, and moha, desire, anger, greed, and delusion, under the general dominance of tamas. This is not laziness in the ordinary moral sense. It is a kind of psychological inertia: knowing what should be done and finding that the doing simply does not follow. A task sits unstarted for a week despite requiring an hour. Practice, here, is less about technique than about the slow accumulation of enough energy and clarity to begin moving at all.

Kṣipta (क्षिप्त)

क्षिप्तम् - रजसा विषयेष्येव वृत्तिमत् ;

kṣiptam — rajasā viṣayeṣv eva vṛttimat,

“Kṣipta is that which, through rajas, has modifications directed only toward sense-objects.”

Kṣipta is the scattered condition, dominated by rajas, its cause rāga-dveṣa, attraction and aversion pulling continuously in opposite directions. This is close to the default condition of most waking life. Attention moves from object to object, each briefly promising some satisfaction and failing, in the having of it, to deliver anything durable. This state needs no modern vocabulary to be recognised; it was fully described long before the notification became the paradigmatic unit of distraction. Movement beyond kṣipta begins when attention is no longer carried away quite so immediately by every new object that presents itself.

Vikṣipta (विक्षिप्त)

विक्षिप्तम् - क्षिप्ताद्विशिष्टं विक्षिप्तम्, सत्वाधिक्येन समाधदपि चित्तं रजोमात्रयाSअन्तराSअन्तरा विषयान्तरवृत्तिमद्;

vikṣiptam — kṣiptād viśiṣṭaṁ vikṣiptam, sattvādhikyena samāhitam api cittaṁ rajomātrayā antarā-antarā viṣayāntara-vṛttimat;

“Vikṣipta is distinguished from kṣipta: even though the mind, through a preponderance of sattva, is at times collected, it is, through a trace of rajas, intermittently modified toward other objects.”

Vikṣipta is the intermittently steadied condition, its cause karmayoga, disciplined engagement with right action. Here sattva has begun to predominate, and real qualities appear: prasannatā, a settled cheerfulness; kṣamā, forbearance; dhairya, steadiness; śraddhā, trust in the practice; dāna, generosity; dayā, compassion; and ojas, a kind of vital lustre visible almost physically in someone whose practice has taken hold. But rajas has not been fully quieted, and continues alongside sattva, which is why vikṣipta carries real vikṣepa, real distraction, even in the presence of real progress. This is recognisably the condition of the sincere practitioner — steady on some days, pulled back on others, without any clear cause. It is not a failure of practice. It is what practice looks like while it is actually working.

Ekāgra (एकाग्र)

एकाग्रम् - एकस्मिन्नेव विषयेSग्रं शिखा यस्य चित्तदीपस्येत्येकाग्रं

ekāgram — ekasminn eva viṣaye agraṁ śikhā yasya citta-dīpasya ity ekāgram;

“Ekāgra is that state in which the flame of the lamp of the mind has its tip fixed on one object alone.”

Ekāgra is one-pointedness, the condition in which rajas and tamas’ capacity to scatter has been arrested and sattva predominates cleanly. Vyāsa notes that in this state the mind becomes capable of direct insight into an extraordinary range of objects, and it is here that vivekakhyāti first becomes available — the discriminative recognition of citta as distinct from what witnesses it. This recognition is real, and it is also, on the tradition’s own account, not yet the final word.

Niruddha (निरुद्ध)

निरुद्धम् - निरुद्धं च निरुद्ध सकल वृत्तिकं संस्कारमात्रशेषमित्यर्थः;

niruddham — niruddhaṁ ca niruddha-sakala-vṛttikaṁ saṁskāra-mātra-śeṣam ity arthaḥ;

“Niruddha means that in which all modifications have been arrested, and only the saṃskāras remain as residue.”

Niruddha is where the most care is needed, because it is easiest to flatten into something it is not: not unconsciousness, not blankness, not suppression intensified. Vivekakhyāti, for all it accomplishes in ekāgra, remains a product of the three guṇas, and whatever arises from the guṇas remains within sukha and duḥkha — still, in the technical sense, a modification. The movement into niruddha requires becoming vairāgya, dispassionate, even toward this discriminative knowledge, releasing the very attainment that made the recognition possible. What follows is a settling in which the seeds of past impressions remain present but lose the capacity to sprout into new modification.

What makes this fivefold map useful is that it removes the illusion of only two available states, scattered and enlightened, with nothing worth attending to between them. Most practice consists of the slow movement from kṣipta toward vikṣipta, and then, unevenly, toward ekāgra. Recognising honestly which condition one is actually in on a given day is itself part of the discipline.

The Gospel that went underground

The question we have to consider in this essay is whether Jesus, regarded as the founder of the Christian religion, actually believed in the God of the Jews or in any God in Heaven and thus divided reality into two worlds. The writers of the four gospels seem to think he did, and the churches both Catholic and Protestant, deriving their doctrines largely from these gospels, follow this view. The gospel writers were naturally influenced by the popular Jewish religious sentiment of the time as well as by prevalent pagan Greek and Egyptian eschatological beliefs. Their writings reflect the feelings and mirror the beliefs of the ordinary man — the soldier, merchant, artisan, slave living in a world of differentiation, division, hostility and discord. To the simple man whose mental capacities denied him a wider, more penetrating vision, this division was the reality, the truth. Did Jesus also subscribe to this idea of the world, or is there proof to the contrary? Was he a dualist, a believer in two realities and two worlds: this one here, and another above — or was he a monist, a man to whom reality was one unitary, organic whole?

Jesus and the One

Naturally, for his listeners, he too had to express his knowledge in terms of that world. He had to use formulas and symbols familiar and acceptable to the peasants and fishermen around him, otherwise he could not hope to make any impact. Concepts had to be simple, arguments concrete; the truth had to be clothed in a recognisable form, adapted and limited to the capacities of his particular audience. But the consequence of his colloquial language was that his messages were interpreted in terms of a dualistic faith. Thus there may be a multitude of quotations which can be brought forward to support a dualistic view, but we cannot be sure that it is a correct or complete interpretation as long as there is a single example asserting a monistic faith, especially if this statement is made to a disciple sufficiently intelligent to grasp the unfamiliar “mystical” language of the Oneness thinker.

To be a true Christian one has to understand the complete truth that Jesus was, and for this one has to know the true man and his teachings. Jesus himself wrote nothing; we have to rely on the understanding of his contemporaries and their interpretation of his message. In this light it seems doubtful that the four gospels “received” by the churches, and the doctrines based upon them, could contain the whole truth that Jesus brought into the world.

Although in the popular gospels there are many quotations to indicate that Jesus was a monist, for the purpose of this essay we will comment only upon the Gospel according to Thomas. Most Christians are acquainted with those sayings in John’s gospel which explain reality from a monistic point of view, such as the famous John 17:22: “And the glory (of oneness) which thou gavest me I have given them; that they may be one, as we are one.” But in addition to these famous words there is a whole collection of monistic sayings of Jesus which the church literally dropped under the table.

What kind of work is this Gospel according to Thomas, which is officially regarded as “apocryphal,” unauthentic, not admitted to the New Testament canon?

600 lost gospels

Luke in his preface declares specifically that his work is based on many earlier writings, and implies the existence of still others he has not been scrupulous enough to consider.

Today every gospel can be judged on its own merits, without any fear or favour derived from the decisions of church fathers during the intervening centuries. The formation of the canon, after all, was a process of elimination rather than of inclusion.

The desires of the busy church organizers were not always compatible with a historical or semantic research for the true Jesus. The early gospels slowly disappeared, leaving only a few traces. Jesus’ actual words dropped out of circulation or were condemned as heretical, and in their place pagan, typically “unchristian” ideas — of God in heaven, of Christ seated on the right hand of God — were accepted into the dogma. The sufferings of Jesus, sin and forgiveness of sin, happy immortality for every baptized person, the raising of the dead and the miraculous healings by Jesus, the wrath to come — all were more popular than the simple teaching:

When you make the two one, you shall become sons of man. [Log 106]

Obviously this simple, deep, but revolutionary kind of thinking demands too much of ordinary man, and a Mediterranean neolithic peasant culture was even less mentally or emotionally ready to accept it than, perhaps, their paleolithic forefathers. The best he could do was to admit that, yes, perhaps Jesus was one with God, but as for me, poor sinning mortal, how can I be the Almighty?

And so the Oneness teaching was buried in the sands of time.

Now, like a miracle, one of those lost gospels has again come to life. Has the time also come for mankind to find itself again in the great oneness of things? Or will some coming generation say about us what Jesus said about his disciples:

You have dismissed the living One and speak about the dead. [Log 52]

The Christian Encyclopedia of Religion and Ethics comments: “The actual process by which ‘our’ four gospels arrived at their present rank of pre-eminence is quite obscure,” — so obscure indeed that only a miracle could illumine the obscurity. The time came when some 600 different gospels were in existence around the Mediterranean, and when every bishop with his gospels declared every other bishop with other gospels heretical. The Emperor Constantine II, who wanted peace in his empire, called a council. And thus as late as 692A.D. the Council of Constantinople had finally to “regulate which books might be read in the church.”

But in the process, the holy fathers almost came to blows and the Pretorian Guard had to be called in. Finally the choice of the gospels was left to the “Holy Ghost.” Each
bishop laid his gospels on an altar, until it was heaped with some 500 rolls, then the centurion of the guard closed the room. The next morning, lo! the three synoptic gospels were found alone on the altar: the others had rolled on to the floor. Presumably to facilitate the action of the Holy Ghost, the windows had been left open.

The forbidden truth

The official gospels have great lacunae, and do not make it clear why Jesus was condemned by the Sanhedrin. Contrary to general belief, Jesus’ statement that he was the son of God was quite in the framework of Jewish mysticism. To call Jehovah father, for an orthodox Jew, was impertinent and presumptuous perhaps, but not something for which one might be condemned to death.

The Roman soldiers also spoke of father Zeus, Jupiter and Mars-Pitar, and the Teutonic legionaries spoke of the All-Father. Caesar himself was considered the son of Venus. No, the step which took him beyond the confines of Mediterranean religious feeling was a thing which no Jewish mystic could do and still call himself a Jew: to claim direct union, existential identity, with God. Because he spoke of this absolute oneness of everything with himself and God, he had to die on the cross. If Jesus had told Pilate, “I am the son of God,” the pragmatic Pilate, the non-mystic, would have smiled and exclaimed, “Another one! We have had so many sons of gods; every petty king, inside and outside the empire, claims to be one.”

But if Jesus had told him what he said to Salome, “I am He, I am the All,” then even the kindest Roman administrator would have concluded, “This man is mad,” and washed his hands, and delivered him to the Sanhedrin. And for the Sanhedrin such a statement would go far beyond the permissible limits of Jewish piety. This was the one thing they could not allow without risking certain destruction of the Jewish Way, based, as it was (and still is), on the most extreme dualism: God and man forever two.

Islam, later inheriting this dualism, had to act in the same way. Any Sufi mystic with an experience similar to that of Jesus was crucified like him. The latest in a long series, estimated at 30,000, was the Bab, the founder of the Bahais, at Tabris in 1850.

The Gospel of Oneness according to Thomas

For more than a thousand years the churches of the Occident depended literally on the three stunted, maimed, corrupt and censored but “synoptic” gospels to which a fourth was added with some gnostic elements: the Gospel according to John.

Suddenly, a generation ago, there took place the most dramatic event in the history of western religion. When the shooting stopped for a moment in Egypt in 1945, an extensive anthology of the sayings of Jesus, which had been lost for sixteen centuries, was found preserved in the dry sands of a tomb near Nag Hamadi. Subject neither to the ravages of time nor to alterations by well-meaning copiers, commentators and translators, they are here today in all their splendour of authentic greatness for every one to read and appreciate.

These Coptic documents go back to a primitive Greek text dating about 100 A.D., one of the earliest related to the New Testament. The experts, of course, are still debating its exact age. The gospel begins with a prologue attributing its recording to the apostle Thomas.

Who was this Thomas?

His full name was Didymos Judas Thomas (didymos in Greek and thomas in Hebrew both mean “the twin”), the same Thomas mentioned in John 20:23 as not believing the materialistic resurrection account, because he knew the living One. Was he the only one among the apostles who did not know death? The following verse in John 20:24 is even more revealing: “And he went inside and met him” — inside himself, of course, not into a house, as the scribes seem to believe.

This capacity to go inside explains why Thomas knew a Jesus of which the other gospel writers were not aware or which they present only in a mutilated, corrupt way.

Logion 13 introduces Thomas. Jesus said to his disciples: “Make a comparison and tell me whom I am like.” Simon Peter (the Galilean fisherman and the most orthodox Jew among them) said to him: “Thou art like an angel of righteousness.” Matthew (the Greek-speaking civil servant) said to him: “Thou art like a wise man (philosophos).” Thomas (our Thomas, the only mystic among them) said to him: “Master, my mouth will not at all be capable of saying whom thou art like.” And Jesus said gently,

I am not thy master, because thou hast drunk, thou hast become drunk from the bubbling spring which I have measured out. [Log 13]

The bubbling spring is the symbol of the gnosis, the knowledge. You drink from its very source, which is not at all like the knowledge you find in a book. The text continues:

And he took him and they withdrew. He spoke three words to him . . . [Log 13]

What these three words were, is not recorded in this gospel but they must have been very important, and as long as we don’t know them we won’t know Jesus. How paramount and radical they seemed to Thomas, however, is described in the following sentences:

When Thomas came back to his companions they asked him, “What did Jesus say to thee?” Thomas said to them: “If I tell you what he said to me, you will take up stones and throw them at me.” [Log 13]

So the three words could hardly have been something about Jesus himself, like “I am the son of man,” because that mysterious expression was simply the Aramaic way of saying “I am an ordinary man like everybody else,” or “I am the son of God”; and in none of the gospels did Jesus say that, and nobody referred to him in that way during his lifetime. Likewise nowhere did Jesus say that he wanted to be the Jewish messiah, let alone the Saviour-God of the Roman Empire.

He said something to Thomas that followed the words: “I am not thy master. . .” It must have been something like the famous three words of the Vedanta: Tat twam asi: “This thou art,” or “I am you,” or “You and I are one,” or “All is one,” or “You are equal to me,” three words, deeply offensive to the other disciples and to the later church, but which we can still find if we also drink from “the bubbling spring” of the living One.

It is not surprising that we can trace this same Thomas later preaching his gospel of oneness as far away as India, a country where he could speak of the oneness of God and man without being stoned, and could even be understood.

The kingdom

The 114 logia or sayings of Jesus collected by Thomas make very different reading from the later gospels adopted by the church as the foundation of its teaching. Here we have the teachings of Jesus himself, who had no intention of being the founder of a popular church. Here is no father in heaven, here are no healings, no miracles, and above all no death on the cross, but a continuous record of Jesus’ statements on oneness.

His disciples asked him: “When will the kingdom come?,” and Jesus said: “It will not come by expecting it. It will not be a matter of saying : ‘See, it is here!’ or — ‘Look, it is there!’ Rather, the Kingdom of the Father is spread over the earth and men do not see it.” [Log 113]

What is this kingdom of which Jesus speaks so frequently? For the churches following the official gospels (or rather the gospels following the church founders) the kingdom is the kingdom of God, or the kingdom of Heaven. But in the gospel of Thomas it is still simply “the kingdom.”

If those who lead you say to you: “See, the Kingdom is in heaven,” then the birds will be before you. If they say to you: “It is in the sea,” then the fish will be before you. But the Kingdom is within you, and it is outside of you. [Log 3]

And there is only one way to enter: Know yourself! [Log 3]

Jesus said: Whoever knows the universe but fails to know himself lacks everything. [Log 67]

How can we know ourselves? Beautiful and clear comes the answer:

When you see your likeness in a mirror you rejoice; but when I show you your true image (ikon) which came into existence before you and which cannot die, can you bear it? [Log 84]

Who is the ruler of this kingdom? Some Wotan, Zeus or Jehovah? No, not in the oneness world. You yourself, as the all-including living One, are the king.

If you bring forth that within yourselves, that which you have will save you. If you do not have that within yourselves, then that which you do not have within you will kill you. [Log 70]

Here again the “that” is the same as the Sanskrit tat, the great oneness of the Rig Veda (10.129.2). No other force can equal this simple awareness that all is one.

Jesus said: If two make peace with each other in this one house (the house of oneness, the kingdom) they shall say to the mountain: “Be moved,” and it shall be moved. [Log 48]

Who has ears to hear, let him hear. [Log 8]

Thomas had those ears, and the words he received and preserved were those Jesus spoke to the mystics, the yogis of coming centuries, the oneness people, the monachoi as Jesus called them, or the gnostics, as theologians classify them derisively today, the “knowers.” On which side did he stand when he spoke of the non-gnostics, the scribes, the grammateis as those who “forget the living Oneness, and speak about the dead,” and described them as dogs sleeping in the manger, neither eating nor allowing the hungry to eat?

The way to this knowledge, or gnosis, Jesus says again and again, is metanoia. This beautiful and meaningful Greek word, from meta: above and beyond, and nous: mind — is no longer accepted as “beyond mind” but is coolly translated as “Repent your sins.”

What place had the notion of sin in the oneness world of Jesus, as Thomas has preserved it for all time to come? It is simply non-existent. In the whole gospel sin is mentioned only a few times, and each time with irony.

But sin indeed has become the foundation stone of our established church, Catholic as well as Protestant. There is hardly a theological book without long dissertations on sin, but to the knowledge of the one and the metanoia of multiplicity of which Jesus speaks there is nowhere any reference. The importance of gnosis, of finding the One, Thomas emphasised right in the beginning.

Let him who seeks, not cease seeking until he finds, and when he finds he will reign over the all. [Log 2]

The single fish

The early Christians had a symbol by which they recognised one another and with which they decorated their meeting places and tombs, and when they were not persecuted, even their houses. It was the fish.

A lot of learned nonsense has been written about the significance of the fish. We are told that the Greek word for fish is ichthys (in Greek capital letters, ΙΧΘΥΣ), and that this is an acronym for Ἰησοῦς Χριστός Θεοῦ Υἱός Σωτήρ — Jesus Christ, son of God, saviour. Obviously the acronym was invented later, and replaced the meaning of the fish after its true significance had already been forgotten, together with Thomas’ gospel.

In the four gospels of the church, fishes and fishermen are frequently mentioned, but there is no explanation as to how a single fish became the hallmark of a Christian. It is in this Gospel according to Thomas, and only here, that we find this fish and an explanation for it.

The man is like a wise fisherman who cast his net into the sea and drew it up from the sea full of small fish. Among them the wise fisherman found a fine large fish. He threw all the small fish back into the sea and took the large one without regret. [Log 8]

How to disregard the net of our sense perception full of small fishes and keep the single one, is a programme for mystics and yogis only. The early church tried hard to keep the single fish, and painted it on the walls of their pagan surroundings to proclaim that a fisherman had passed who kept the large one without regret. But later theologians threw the big one away and kept the multiplicity of small fry.

A variant of the single fish story is that of the single pearl.

Jesus said: The kingdom is like a merchant who possessed merchandise and saw a pearl. The merchant was wise. He sold the merchandise and bought the one pearl for himself. [Log 76]

Another variation of the fisherman with the single fish is the shepherd with the one sheep.

Jesus said: The kingdom is like a shepherd who had many sheep. One of them, the largest, went astray. The shepherd left all the others and sought for the one until he found it. Tired, he said to the one: “I love thee more than all the others.” [Log 107]

Not only must we love the living Oneness more than all else, but also be ourself in our own being undivided, of one single piece: monachos. The word monachos, which appears many times in the Gospel of Thomas, is one of the key words for the understanding of Jesus’ message.

Jesus said: Many are standing at the door, but the monachoi are the ones who will enter the bridal chamber. [Log 75]

Who are these monachoi? Ordinarily the word is translated into English as “monk,” which is without doubt the direct linear descendant of the Greek monachos. But when Jesus spoke of monachos did he mean the man who lived a solitary life, segregated in the desert, the hermit, the recluse?

We read in the same gospel Jesus’ negative opinion about ascetic behaviour, about fasting and praying. And when we meet the first so-called Christian monks in the Egyptian desert, they were not monachoi in the accepted sense of solitary hermits, but cœnobites (from koinobia) with a well-organised community life and common devotional exercises.

Luckily, ancient Greek is a well-explored and marvellously clear language, against which the tortuous inventions of our Bible translations stand out awkwardly.

Monas (from the root, monos, one), used in Plato’s Phædo (101e), means oneness, the unity of the cosmos, and the adjective monachos characterises someone or something which is undivided, of one piece. The feminine monache is the name of a garment woven in a single piece without a seam, such as, according to tradition, Jesus wore.

So monachos in Jesus’ mouth certainly means not solitary, monotropos, but the simple, the unique, the undivided, the seamless one, the man who has attained to the summit of being, oneness of self, liberation.

Seeing this we can understand what Jesus meant when he said:

Blessed are the monachoi for you shall find the kingdom; because you come — from it and you shall go there again. [Log 49J

If you are still uncertain as to what monachos meant to Jesus, here is the next logion:

If they say to you: “From where have you originated?,” say to them: “We have come from the Light, where the Light has originated through itself and reveals itself in our image.” [Log 50J

Another key word of the Gospel according to Thomas is “the living One.”

What is the living One?

Obviously he is not dead. He did not die on a cross in Jerusalem 2000 years ago, even if his body hung there. He is not the one you see still hanging on that cross in Christian churches. Neither is he “resurrected,” because to be resurrected you have to die first — something not very likely for one who made this promise to his disciples:

Whoever knows will not taste death. [Log 19]

Also to be a living One he cannot be sitting in some heaven, he has to be alive.

To be alive one has to be embodied, to be incarnate, to breathe, eat, drink, and evacuate. We may think of ghosts, of course, but ghosts are not alive; they do not belong to the world of the living, they are not the living One. Jesus never said he was or would be a ghost but that he was a son of man and the living One. To be alive and to be the son of man there is only one place one can be, and that is on this planet, earth. There is only one condition one has to fulfill to be a Christian, and that is to be a son of man and a living One.

“I will be with you,” he promised. So don’t look for him among the dead. But that is what the church has done for 2000 years, discussing the historicity of Jesus as somebody who was born on a certain date and died on a certain date and is now dead. Obviously they were not looking for someone like Jesus, who said: “Before Adam was I was.” And mark well, he didn’t say, “I was disembodied” or “in a glorious body.” He simply said, “I was,” just like Adam, like a squirrel or a chicken or you.

There is only one way to be the living One forever and ever, and that is to be Life itself, to identify oneself with all Life, from the amœba to that superamœba, man. And that is why Jesus has said, “I am the Life.” He also told us what to do to be the Life, so that each one of us might be able to say, “I am the Life.” We have to get rid of the illusion of being a separate individual. But this teaching, how to be the living One, has disappeared among the childish miracles and sentimental prayers of the church, which can only emphasize your difference, your duality. Of the glory of oneness there remain only sad traces here and there that have to be searched out.

The first thing to do if you want to be the living One is to let the dead bury their dead in their churches. Then you must renounce supernatural godheads in favour of Life itself. Stop praying to imaginary divinities and search for the living oneness of all things, and once you have found it, be it.

To be the living One it is not sufficient to be alive as ordinary people are alive. They have ears and they hear not, they have eyes and they see not, and therefore they die. In the meantime they are neither dead nor awake nor alive.

To be the living One you have to put as much accent on the one as on the living: you have to be one. Once you have seen and felt this great living oneness of all things, then it is not difficult to become it, because secretly and fundamentally you are it already. You are the living One, you who by error and lack of awareness have believed yourself to be separate from the whole. You thought you were a beggar in this world, you thought it belonged to somebody else, but in secret you are a king, a king in your kingdom.

Once you have discovered the living One, you have entered your kingdom, and then all you have to do is never again to divide anything into two.

Throughout the gospel the whole emphasis is on the one. The cosmic oneness we have to attain, and in which Jesus lived, is beautifully illustrated in logion 77:

I am the All, the All came forth from Me and the All returns into Me. Cleave a piece of wood, I am there: lift up the stone and you will find Me. [Log 77]

And Jesus emphasises that He does not make this claim for himself alone, exclusively, as the church wants us to believe, but for everyone. So logion 80 continues:

Whoever knows the world (cosmos) has found the body (soma) and whoever has found the body, of him the world is not worthy. [Log 80]

Monos

The single one, monos, the same, the undivided, is the constant theme of the Gospel according to Thomas. In endless variation, in saying after saying, we come back to this same message of Jesus: the One.

Jesus saw little children were being suckled. He said to his disciples: These children are like those who enter the kingdom. They said to him: Shall we then become children, to enter the kingdom? When you make the two one, and when you make the inner world as the outer and the outer as the inner and the above as the below, and when you make the male and the female into a single one so that the male will not be anymore a male, and the female a female, when you put a single eye in the place of the many and a single hand in the place of hands and one foot in the place of feet, and a single image in the place of all the images, then you shall enter. [Log 22]

And in case we have not yet understood what Jesus means, he continues:

On the day when you were one, you became two. But when you have become two, what will you do? [Log 11]

Yes, what will you do when you have separated matter and spirit, man and god, body and soul, good arid evil, heaven and earth, yourself and others? What will you do?

Jesus said: It is impossible for a man to mount two horses and to stretch two bows and it is impossible for a servant to serve two masters. [Log 47]

What did Jesus think about the popular ideas of the religious people around him?

They said to him: “Come and let us fast and pray today.” Jesus said: Which then is the sin that I have committed and in what way have I been divided? [Log 104]

Jesus said: If you fast you will commit a sin against yourselves, and if you pray you will condemn yourselves, and if you give alms, you will also hurt yourselves [Log 14]

. . . because each time you do one of these things you leave the kingdom, the world of oneness, and assume duality. There is only one sin and that is to divide oneself!

What Jesus proposes is a new awareness of the oneness “so that my joy may be in you and your joy may be made perfect.” [John 15:11]

Salome said: “Who are you, and who is your father?” Jesus said to her: “I am he. We are the same. What belonged to my father was also given to me.” Salome said: “I am thy disciple.” Jesus said to her: “If you are one and undivided you will be filled with light but if you divide (yourself) you will be filled with darkness.” [Log 61]

This total oneness is again taken up in logion 108:

Whoever drinks my words from me shall become as I am and I myself will become he and that which is hidden will be revealed. [Log 108]

But only when we forget everything the churches told us and simply drink in the words of Jesus without prejudice can we discover their authentic greatness, their saving grace, their liberating force.

Here again Jesus says clearly that he means the oneness solution not only for himself exclusively — that would have little meaning for the world — but for everybody who drinks his words. In logion 112 we find a warning against duality:

Woe to the flesh which depends upon the soul: woe to the soul which depends on the flesh. [Log 112]

And what about the pious dualists, the believers in two? Only by duality could those “holy” men market the “holy” scriptures so successfully.

And successful they were. By the year 337 the gentle oneness teacher had become the acknowledged “Theos Soter,” the official god-saviour of the mightiest slave empire of all time. Duality, tribalism, racism, ignorance had triumphed again. Christianity under Constantine had become the official state religion, and from then on the kingdom and Jesus were safe in heaven and anybody who spoke of the oneness was declared to be agnostic or heretical and wiped out by fire and sword.

For the founders of the first churches the Gospel according to Thomas was of course a continuous painful reminder of the real personality of Jesus, and together with the Gospel of James, also one of the earlier Gospels, was still quoted by the church fathers Origen, Justinus, and Clement of Alexandria, as well as by Irenaeus, Eusebius and Hippolytus. And it was mentioned in the catalogue of Nicephoras (599) as one of the holy books. But it had to disappear if a popular religion was to be the aim.

Under the inexorable pressure of the administrators of the state religion, the Gospel of Thomas was buried, and later known only by name, like the Gospel of Mathias, the Gospel of Andrew, the Gospel of Thaddeus, etc. etc. And perhaps we will never know if those other forbidden and lost Gospels’ were likewise Oneness Gospels. Very likely they were.

Where to find the true Jesus?

Wherever the two are one I am with them. [Log 30]

He who lives in the living Oneness shall not see death; and the heaven and the earth will be rolled out in his presence. [Log 111]

Once we have read the Gospel according to Thomas we realise, perhaps with a shock, how different Jesus was from the pompous “Only begotten Son,” and how different the true Christian has to be from the typical homo religiosus whom Jesus called the grammateus, the man with the holy book, the holy mien, full of holy words: The Lord, the Law, Wrath, Repentance, Paradise, Hell, the Devil, Damnation, Sin, Redemption, etc. — all things utterly foreign to Jesus as he appears to us in the Thomas gospel. He was no Galilean Billy Graham talking to the multitudes, no ascetic saint macerating himself and his disciples by penances, not the popular preacher of hell-fire and brimstone nor the sentimental sweet Jesus of the “Now let’s all be nice to each other and everything will be all right.”

If what he says is shocking, what he does not say in this most ancient of all gospels is even more shocking. We realise how perverted those words were which the busy church fathers invented in their eagerness to convert the crowds in the Agora.

Of course they had to be careful not to scandalize the aristocratic Roman administrators with what he really said. When those public relations specialists took over, the first thing they did was to create an entirely new Jesus, and then they invented a Jerusalem Madison Avenue lingo to sell him to their customers: The Anointed, the Saviour, the Redeemer, the Mediator, the Intercessor, the Judge, the Only Begotten, the Man of Sorrows, the Prince of Peace, the True Vine — all sales slogans. These ancestors of our automobile and soap advertisers created Jesus as the only son of God, the founder of a new religion, a new duality, a new way to separate God from man and man from man. Which is the genuine Jesus? The hero of the popular stories, of the miracles? The messiah of the Jewish people? Or the luminous teacher of oneness whom Thomas presents? Each one of us has to decide for himself.

Jesus the lover of the One as we meet him in the gospel of Thomas, and Jesus “the divider,” of the Christian churches, are too different for this difference to be overcome by nice facile arguments. It cannot be the same Jesus who says of himself, “I am the all,” and about others, “You come from the light,” and who then threatens his listeners with a coming judgment: “Depart from me you cursed into everlasting fire” (Matthew 25:41), or “The wrath of God abideth on you.”

Of course the man of oneness cannot be understood by the man who lives in duality. Which Jesus you are finally going to choose depends exclusively on your evolutionary status, whether you are only a man or already a son of man. He who chooses the oneness has already been chosen by the oneness.

Perhaps the pure miracle which has brought the Gospel according to Thomas back to life is a sign that the time has come for a new beginning, for a new age of oneness; perhaps it signifies this final coming of Jesus, the living One, a retelling of his true mission, by the simple awareness that the living One was always with us.

A man said to Him: “Tell my brethren to divide my father’s possessions with me.” He said to him: “O man, who made me divider?” He turned to his disciples, and he said to them: “I am not a divider, am I?” [Log 72]

If the world around Jesus had listened to his message of oneness it would have been spared its cultural schizophrenia, its thousand year long neurosis leading practically to the end of civilisation, its splitting into innumerable sects and churches, tribes and nations, the long nightmare of the dark ages with their religious wars and their persecutions of thinkers and scientists. The time may finally have come to get rid of our paleolithic gods, together with our bloody, sickening, disabling duality!

Ancient Palestine had always been the meeting place of Occident and Orient, where the religions of Africa and Egypt, Greece and Rome, Persia, India and the Far East melted into one. Jesus, although naturally knowing about the popular religious feelings of duality, belonged rather to that Oriental minority of thinkers, mystics and yogis who had penetrated behind the veil of multiplicity into the shining oneness of things and beings which he called the kingdom, the light, the fire — words used thousands of years before in the ancient Vedas of India to speak about the world of the living One.

I have cast fire upon the world, and see, I guard it until the world is afire. [Log 10]

The day will come when the churches of the Occident will be forced to recognize this world and withdraw their condemnation of the gnostics as unchristian and heretical, and by withdrawing it abolish the dividing line between East and West, the wall of dualism between themselves and God, and accept the gnosis of the heart, the living One.

Search for the living One as long as you live, lest you die and be unable to see. [Log 59]

Blessed he who was before he came into being. [Log 19]

Medhananda (1908–1994) — A brief biography

Despite his early interest in ancient cultures, their symbols, and their spirituality, Fritz Winkelstroeter fulfilled his father’s wish and studied law at Munich, Heidelberg, and Paris. During this time he was privileged to also study Chinese under the distinguished scholar Richard Wilhelm, translator of the Chinese I Ching, Tao Te Ching and many other ancient texts. In 1933 he left his position as Junior Judge at the High Court of Frankfurt. The following year he left Germany with his French wife to escape the rise of Nazism. They went to Tahiti in French Polynesia, settled on Tahiti’s sister island Moorea, where they bought 200 hectares of virgin forest, built a small house, and established themselves as farmers, cultivating vanilla and coffee.

During World War II, Fritz was interned near Tahiti as an enemy alien. After his release in 1946 he came across the writings of Sri Aurobindo, and in 1952 he joined the Sri Aurobindo Ashram in Pondicherry, India. There The Mother, Sri Aurobindo’s spiritual collaborator, gave him the name “Medhananda”2 and put him in charge of the Ashram’s Library. (In 1926, Sri Aurobindo had entrusted to The Mother both the spiritual and the physical welfare of his disciples.)

For many years Medhananda taught History of Religion at the Sri Aurobindo International Centre of Education. In 1965 he became editor of the quarterly journal Equals One, for which he wrote numerous articles. In about 1970 he began an in-depth study of the symbology of the hieroglyphs and imagery of ancient Egypt, using the same psychological approach by which Sri Aurobindo discovered the esoteric sense of the Vedas of ancient India. In 1978, together with his collaborator Yvonne Artaud, he founded the Identity Research Institute, a non-profit foundation for psychological research.

I don’t feel like saying anything. Everything worth saying has been said hundreds of times. Everything not worth saying has been said a million times. It’s time to shut up, grab the popcorn, and let events unfold.

Meanwhile, a word in support of shutting up. What follows is from “The Intuitive Mind,” a chapter of Sri Aurobindo’s The Synthesis of Yoga. It was originally published in the Arya’s issue of July 1920.

The original nature of supermind is the self-conscience and all-conscience of the Infinite, of the universal Spirit and Self in things, organising on the foundation and according to the character of a direct self-knowledge its own wisdom and effective omnipotence for the unfolding and the regulated action of the universe and of all things in the universe.... As it knows itself, so too it knows all things — for all are only becomings of itself — directly, totally and from within outward, spontaneously in detail and arrangement, each thing in the truth of itself and its nature and in its relation to all other things. And it knows similarly all action of its energy in antecedent or cause and occasion of manifestation and effect or consequence, all things in infinite and in limited potentiality and in selection of actuality and in their succession of past, present and future....

[I]n 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 and one for which there are no organs in his present physical or mental system: he has either to evolve a new organ for it or else to adopt or transform existing ones and make them utilisable for the purpose. He has not merely to uncover the hidden sun of the supermind in the subliminal cavern of his secret being or remove the cloud of his mental ignorance from its face in the spiritual skies so that it shall at once shine out in all its glory. His task is much more 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.

[The sense mind, the intelligence, the reason] by which he is at present distinguished from all other terrestrial creatures ... are the instruments in which he has learned to put his trust and he has erected by their means certain foundations which he is not over willing to disturb and has traced limits outside of which he feels all to be confusion, uncertainty and a perilous adventure. Moreover the transition to the higher principle means not only a difficult conversion of his whole mind and reason and intelligence, but in a certain sense a reversal of all their methods. The soul climbing above a certain critical line of change sees all its former operations as an inferior and ignorant action and has to effect another kind of working which sets out from a different starting-point and has quite another kind of initiation of the energy of the being....

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; so far as it emerges into a clear separate action, it is still occasional, partial, fragmentary and of an intermittent character. It casts a sudden light, it makes a luminous suggestion or it throws out a solitary brilliant clue or scatters a small number of isolated or related intuitions, lustrous discriminations, inspirations or revelations, and it leaves the reason, will, mental sense or intelligence to do what each can or pleases with this seed of succour that has come to them from the depths or the heights of our being.

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, to coat them up in or infiltrate them with the mental stuff and suggestion, often altering their truth in the process and always limiting their potential force of enlightenment by these accretions and by this subdual to the exigencies of the inferior agent, and almost always they make at once too little and too much of them, too little by not allowing them time to settle and extend their full power for illumination, too much by insisting on them or rather on the form into which the mentality casts them to the exclusion of the larger truth that the more consistent use of the intuitive faculty might have given....

It appears at once that there are two necessary lines of progress which we must follow, and the first is to extend the action of the intuition and make it more constant, more persistent and regular and all-embracing until it is so intimate and normal to our being that it can take up all the action now done by the ordinary mind and assume its place in the whole system. 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.... [W]hen 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 to silence the mind altogether, to silence the intellect, the mental and personal will, the desire mind and the mind of emotion and sensation, and to allow in that perfect silence the Self, the Spirit, the Divine to disclose himself and leave him to illuminate the being by the supramental light and power and Ananda. And this is indeed a great and powerful discipline. It is the calm and still mind much more readily and with a much greater purity than the mind in agitation and action that opens to the Infinite, reflects the Spirit, becomes full of the Self and awaits like a consecrated and purified temple the unveiling of the Lord of all our being and nature. It is true also that the freedom of this silence gives a possibility of a larger play of the intuitive being and admits with less obstruction and turmoil of mental groping and seizing the great intuitions, inspirations, revelations which emerge from within or descend from above. It is therefore an immense gain if we can acquire the capacity of always being able at will to command an absolute tranquillity and silence of the mind free from any necessity of mental thought or movement and disturbance and, based in that silence, allow thought and will and feeling to happen in us only when the Shakti wills it and when it is needful for the divine purpose. [SY 799‒803]

Objectivity is a subject’s delusion that observing can be done without him. Involving objectivity is abrogating responsibility – hence its popularity. — Heinz von Foerster1

Hoel’s lament

Some time ago, neuroscientist, philosopher, and fiction writer Erik Hoel published a Substack post titled “We Consciousness Researchers Have Failed You.” He begins by telling us that Michael Pollan’s latest book, A World Appears: A Journey into Consciousness, has been recommended to him “by almost everyone at this point.” And yet, he “barely made it through,” experiencing the following sensations while reading: frustration, dread, restless legs, and overwhelming waves of weariness. “At one point I felt physically nauseous.”

I can relate. The following passage also resonates:

I felt that every next chapter or section could have been predicted by some statistical machine for producing books about consciousness (“Okay, here’s the part about David Chalmers coming up”). And yes, I have the advantage of being a researcher in the same subject and have even worked with some of the figures Pollan writes about, which is why in my own The World Behind the World (we all seem to gravitate to the same titles, huh) I broadly told much the same story. But you can even go back to science journalist John Horgan’s The Undiscovered Mind, published in 1999, to get similar progress beats and quite familiar names. It’s been 27 years, during which the discussion has (as many fields of science do) centered around major figures like neuroscientists Christof Koch or Giulio Tononi or Antonio Damasio or philosophers like David Chalmers.

How, then, have consciousness researchers failed us, as Hoel claims or confesses?

Right now, there’s some college student falling in love with a chatbot instead of the young woman who sits next to him in class, all because science literally cannot tell him that the chatbot is lying about experiencing love.

So, science doesn’t know enough about consciousness to tell apart AI consciousness from human consciousness. In Hoel this evokes the nightmarish vision of our civilization acting “like a reverse metamorphosis, where something weaker but more beautiful, organic consciousness, gets shed in the birth of some horrible star-devouring insect made of matrix multiplication. And then it turns out there is nothing it is like to be two matrices multiplying.” To Hoel, the academic research on consciousness has so far been “a somewhat cushy gig.”

Other people’s lives aren’t immediately on the line in the way they are for cancer research, and the ideas are fun to discuss on podcasts, and no opinion can really be proven wrong. So I think many of us have been guilty of thinking, deep down, that nothing will ever fully get solved, and so working on consciousness basically means getting to talk about interesting stuff, promoting your pet theory of the moment at conferences, writing some papers that only a few other researchers really read, maybe stuffing some undergrads in a brain scanner and making some colorful figures, getting jealous about funding and petty about who is on what committee, and basically just career-maxxing the decades away.

But that won’t do any longer.

Having a massive hole in humanity’s scientific worldview is Actually Bad and our ignorance has led to instability and uncertainty and now, actual danger, and consciousness researchers need to Get Off Their Collective Asses and actually solve this problem.

And the reason why it hasn’t yet been solved? Essentially, money:

Humanity spends something like a billion dollars a year on CERN. To compare, let’s look at the biggest scientific funder in the United States, the NIH. Out of 103,280 grants awarded to scientists during the 2007-2017 decade, want to guess how many were about directly studying the contents of consciousness? — Five.... So if you’re a consciousness researcher, what can you do, cheaply? What can you do, for free? You can pontificate. You can propose your own theory of consciousness! That requires no funding whatsoever.

In the closing section, Hoel makes an interesting claim:

If the 2020s were all about intelligence, then necessarily the 2030s will be all about consciousness. Intelligence is about function, while consciousness is about being, and forays and progress into understanding (and shaping) function will in turn force our attention toward a better understanding of being.

So, consciousness has less to do with intelligence than it has with being. This points in the right direction.

Who or what am I? Deikman’s take

In an essay written shortly after his arrival in Pondicherry, Sri Aurobindo wrote: “It is not true that because I think, I am; but rather because I think, feel and act, and even while I am doing any or all of these things, can transcend the thought, feeling and action, therefore I am.” [EDH 8‒9] In other words, my sense of being does not depend on my thinking, feeling, or acting; for even when my thoughts, feelings and actions are stripped away, my sense of being remains. Pure consciousness remains, and that’s what I am.

Many serious thinkers have made this point. A.J. Deikman, for instance, wrote a paper titled “‘I’=awareness”.2 Some excerpts:

When you introspect you will find that no matter what the contents of your mind, the most basic “I” is something different. Every time you try to observe the “I” it takes a jump back with you, remaining out of sight. At first you may say, “When I look inside as you suggest, all I find is content of one sort or the other.” I reply, “Who is looking? Is it not you? If that ‘I’ is a content can you describe it? Can you observe it?” The core “I” of subjectivity is different from any content because it turns out to be that which witnesses — not that which is observed.... “I” is the observer, the experiencer, prior to all conscious content.

[W]hen we use introspection to search for the origin of our subjectivity, we find that the search for “I” leaves the customary aspects of personhood behind and takes us closer and closer to awareness, per se. If this process of introspective observation is carried to its conclusion, even the background sense of core subjective self disappears into awareness. Thus, if we proceed phenomenologically, we find that the “I” is identical to awareness.

Awareness ... is featureless, lacking form, texture, colour, spatial dimensions. These characteristics indicate that awareness is of a different nature than the contents of the mind; it goes beyond sensation, emotions, ideation, memory. Awareness is at a different level, it is prior to contents, more fundamental. Awareness has no intrinsic content, no form, no surface characteristics — it is unlike everything else we experience, unlike objects, sensations, emotions, thoughts, or memories.

Who or what am I? Priyadarshi’s take

In a recent Substack post, Chandan Priyadarshi defined awareness as “the condition in which any appearance — perception, concept, equation, memory, doubt, or world-model — becomes present.” Awareness is “prior to the distinction between inner and outer, prior to the brain that supposedly produces it, prior to the individual who seems to possess it.”

Leibniz’s principle of the Identity of Indiscernibles applies here, at the terminus of subjectivity, just as it applies at what may be called the terminus of objectivity: a fundamental particle in itself, stripped of its attributes, which only characterize its relations to other things. In the case of a fundamental particle in itself as in the case of an individual’s awareness, the absence of distinguishing characteristics implies numerical identity. (In saying this, I gloss over the following facts: fundamental particles exist as individuals only in experimental contexts; experimental contexts only exist in experience; and experience always takes place in the encompassing context of awareness.)

Here is what, according to Priyadarshi, cannot be disputed — and I have said many of these things in previous posts:

Every datum ever recorded, every measurement ever taken, every physical law ever formulated, every experiment ever designed and interpreted — without exception —appeared within awareness. Not within a brain, as that formulation already smuggles in the conclusion. The brain is itself a structure inferred from appearances within awareness. The neurons, the synapses, the biochemical cascades that are offered as the ground of experience: all of them appeared to awareness before they could serve as explanations of it.

This is not a philosophical position. It is an observation about the structure of inquiry.... The medium precedes its contents. And the medium has never been stepped outside of, not once, in the entire history of scientific or philosophical investigation. Modern inquiry proceeds as though a neutral vantage exists — a view from nowhere from which consciousness can be examined as one object among others. No such position has ever been occupied. Every model of reality, including models purporting to explain consciousness as a product of matter, is itself an event within the very medium it attempts to explain. The investigator cannot stand outside the condition of investigation. This is not a limitation to be overcome with better instruments. It is structural....

The question is not whether consciousness exists within the universe. The question is whether the universe, as known, exists anywhere except within awareness.... [T]he distinction between perceiver and perceived is itself an appearance within awareness....

The burden of proof lies with the default picture. Materialism must explain how it established that consciousness exists inside the universe when every piece of evidence for the universe was gathered inside awareness. That explanation has not been given. It has not been attempted. It has not been noticed as necessary....

Neuroscience searches for the observer. It finds neural correlates of attention. It finds global integration, salience weighting, recurrent processing. It does not find the witness. This is not a failure waiting on improved technology. It is structural....

When introspection scans for a bare “I” apart from its contents, it finds nothing — as Hume correctly noted. There is no Cartesian ego waiting to be located.... The self-object — the reified, locatable ego — is absent. This is true. What is not absent is the awareness within which the search occurred and within which the result of “nothing found” appeared. Something was there throughout the search. It witnessed the not-finding....

The failure to locate the observer is not evidence against awareness as substrate. It is precisely what the framework predicts.

Priyadarshi considers the following to be the strongest objection to these ideas:

What about the Big Bang? What about the four billion years of Earth’s history before any observer arrived? What about dinosaur fossils recording events that no mind witnessed? Any philosophy that makes reality depend on observers renders pre-human history incoherent. This is Quentin Meillassoux’s ancestral realm argument, and it is not easily dismissed.3

One coherent resolution, Priyadarshi finds, “draws on Sri Aurobindo’s concept of involution”:

This resolution is structurally more coherent than anything Western idealism offers for the same problem. It is also more coherent than positions that simply bracket the question and hope the objection loses urgency. It does not lose urgency. It deserves a direct answer, and this is one.

My own two cents

To solve this problem, we do not need a high-powered metaphysical system like Sri Aurobindo’s. If all human knowledge is rooted in the encompassing matrix of human experience — the qualifier “human” is important here — then reality, truth, and fact are built on trust — trust in our objectifiable mental constructs. Belief is not enough. The viability of these constructs requires continuous testing / verification (which also is never enough, being always threatened by the possibility of falsification).

That said, the Big Bang, the four billion years of Earth’s pre-human history, and the fossils are as objective as any human construct can aspire to be. It is a self-evident statement that what existed (i) prior to the emergence of human life and (ii) independently of human thought is inaccessible to human thought. This does not preclude the objective/objectifiable reality of what existed prior to the emergence of human life to the extent it is accessible to human thought. Meillassoux’s desire to sever a mentally constructed reality from the constructing mind or consciousness won’t wash.

The reason I insisted above on the qualifier “human” is that there is another kind of knowledge based on another kind of experience. While the human kind is rational and mental, the other kind is suprarational and supramental. When we embrace a metaphysical system like Sri Aurobindo’s, we open ourselves to a domain of reality, truth, and fact that is warranted by an experience which (as yet) is inaccessible to us. At the highest point of this experience there is what the Vedic seers have termed a “truth-consciousness.” This, according to Sri Aurobindo, is

a knowledge which determines a wholly effective will-power that does not deviate or falter in its process or in its result, but expresses and fulfils spontaneously and inevitably in the act that which has been seen in the vision. Light is here one with Force, the vibrations of knowledge with the rhythm of the will and both are one, perfectly and without seeking, groping or effort, with the assured result. [LD 132‒33]

Here, there no longer is any need of testing or verification. Here, there is no gulf between the knowledge and the known. In fact, the knower, the knowledge, and the known are one — a single all-encompassing, all-originating conscious force and substance. But, needless to say, nobody can get there in one bound. Until that is reached, the need for testing and verification persists. Quoting Sri Aurobindo: “I think I can say that I have been testing day and night for years upon years more scrupulously than any scientist his theory or his method on the physical plane.” [Letters on Himself and the Ashram, p. 322]

Since we have no access to Sri Aurobindo’s knowledge or experience except through his literary attempts to make some of it accessible to us, we have to remain skeptical, not of his words, but of how they are understood by us. That aside, what he has given us is a metaphysical system we can trust, and which allows us to transcend the position of the mental “I” (which encompasses human experience and knowledge) and instead take the position of the supramental Self or Spirit (which encompasses the manifestation in all its spatial, temporal, and supraphysical dimensions). We become cognizant of the relation of mind to supermind and the extent to which mental knowledge can represent supramental truth or aspects thereof. And we can talk about pre-human history unfettered by the limits of human experience, in terms sanctioned by a higher than mental experience. This is what Priyadarshi does when he draws on Sri Aurobindo’s concept of involution.

The real existentially dangerous ignorance is not our failure to tell consciousness from non-consciousness

This brings me back to Hoel’s Monetary Theory of Consciousness. I do not believe for a moment that a billion dollars would do much to make us understand how awareness — the ultimate context of human experience — is related to the content of human experience, including the brain studied by neuroscientists and speculated about by tenured philosophers. This relation cannot be found among the goings-on in a brain; for, as Sri Aurobindo observed,

the physical sense-organs are not the creators of sense-perceptions, but themselves the creation, the instruments and here a necessary convenience of the cosmic sense; the nervous system and vital organs are not the creators of life’s action and reaction, but themselves the creation, the instruments and here a necessary convenience of the cosmic Life-force; the brain is not the creator of thought, but itself the creation, the instrument and here a necessary convenience of the cosmic Mind. [LD 270]

Hoel declares rather dramatically that he refuses “to live in a civilization where we cannot tell consciousness from non-consciousness.... Where we cannot explain the difference between actually experiencing things vs just processing them. In the short term, this is destabilizing and harmful. In the long term, it may be literally existentially dangerous.”

While I understand the feeling, I repudiate the belief that “all the failures around consciousness, and the defeatist attitudes in response (mysterianism, illusionism, definitional deflation), can be viewed as a kind of learned helplessness after a few short decades of modern scientific research with zero serious funding.”

I salute the “older spirits of adventure” stirring in Hoel’s veins, manifesting the Antarctic explorer Ernest Shackleton “in desperate need of foresighted financiers and able-bodied men and women, young and ambitious, for a hard journey into icy lands unknown.” But now the time is ripe for a younger spirit of adventure and a different, often equally hard journey into different, often just as metaphorically icy lands.

Today, what needs exploring is the world within ourselves (by which I don’t mean within our brains). As the Mother’s disciple Satprem wrote in an inspired essay, “the Adventure is within.” It is the time for “the great adventure,” to which the Mother invited those who love adventure.

Hoel’s call to action aims at a re-enactment of the Heroic Age of Antarctic Exploration on the mental plane of scientific research. Yet the real ignorance which is destabilizing and harmful calls for a re-enactment of this Heroic Age on a different plane. The ignorance which is existentially dangerous is not our failure to tell consciousness from non-consciousness in scientific or mental terms. Our failure to tell the difference points to a greater Ignorance that needs to be overcome — the essential ignorance (Avidya) of the Vedantic philosopher-seers, because of which we only see Many where in reality there is but One playing at being Many. This essential ignorance manifests itself in seven distinct ways.

Of lesser importance than overcoming this greater ignorance — but still — is arriving at a mental understanding of how awareness (the general context of human experience) is related to its content. There is no direct path from the experienced (rather than experiencing) human brain to the experiencing “I”. To get there, we first need to understand how the “I” of human awareness is related to the Self, Spirit, or Consciousness, chit, of the Vedantic philosopher-seers. Then we need to understand how this is related to their concept of Being, sat. Then we need to understand involution — the incremental process by which Conscious Being, Sachchidananda, ends up manifesting physical matter. Then we need to understand the evolutionary emergence of increasingly complex material structures capable of (a) being affected by external objects and (b) supplying the awareness involved in matter with increasingly complex content. And finally, there is the question of what makes these material structures capable of mediating experience.

This is best understood by parsing the stages of involution. In Sachchidananda’s original status, Consciousness is one with Being, so the subject is one with its object. The foundation of all knowledge is identity. When Conscious Being adopts a multitude of localized standpoints, knowledge by identity takes the form of direct knowledge: each individual conscious being knows the others directly, without mediating representations. When Conscious Being identifies itself with each individual to the exclusion of all others, knowledge of the others becomes an indirect knowledge, i.e., a direct knowledge by the individual of some of its internal attributes (think neural firing patterns), which serve as representations of external objects. How, then, do we experience external objects when all we seem to be given is internal neural representations?

To arrive at such an understanding, we begin with the fact that the foundation of all knowledge is identity. It is the identity of the knower with the known that makes direct knowledge possible, and it is a secret direct knowledge that undergirds the possibility of an indirect or mediated knowledge. The information provided by neural firing patterns is supplemented and completed by a direct knowledge from a source that is subliminal to the separative consciousness on the surface, which we take to be the whole of our consciousness. Quoting Sri Aurobindo:

In the surface consciousness knowledge represents itself as a truth seen from outside, thrown on us from the object, or as a response to its touch on the sense, a perceptive reproduction of its objective actuality…. Since it is unable to see what is within its deeper self or observe the process of the knowledge coming from within, [our surface mind] has no choice but to accept what it does see, the external object, as the cause of its knowledge…. In fact, it is a hidden deeper response to the contact, a response coming from within that throws up from there an inner knowledge of the object, the object being itself part of our larger self. [LD 560‒561]

Regarding the intervention by a subliminal source:

[W]hat we get by our sense is not the inner or intimate touch of the thing itself, but an image of it or a vibration or nerve message in ourselves through which we have to learn to know it. These means are so ineffective, so exiguous in their poverty that, if that were the whole machinery, we could know little or nothing or only achieve a great blur of confusion. But there intervenes a sense-mind intuition which seizes the suggestion of the image or vibration and equates it with the object, a vital intuition which seizes the energy or figure of power of the object through another kind of vibration created by the sense contact, and an intuition of the perceptive mind which at once forms a right idea of the object from all this evidence. Whatever is deficient in the interpretation of the image thus constructed is filled up by the intervention of the reason or the total understanding intelligence. [LD 547–548]

I have said these thing and quoted these passages in previous posts, but since meanwhile this substack has attracted a moderate number of new subscribers — Welcome Y’all — I thought it permissible to say or quote them again.

The Principle of Sufficient Reason (PSR) states that everything must have a sufficient reason to exist, occur, or be true. In a recent post Marco Masi has thrown doubt on the truth of the PSR. His doubts may be justified, for I can see no sufficient reason for the PSR to be true — except for one: rational thought must perforce take its validity for granted, because finding the reason why a thing exists, happens, or is true is its job. You can’t look for a cause if you don’t assume that there is one to be found.

Long before I became a “card carrying” Aurobindonian, long before I embarked on this amazing adventure of consciousness, long even before I enrolled at the University of Göttingen to study physics, I was struck by the extraordinary poverty of the explanatory tools which language puts at our disposal.

Because we can form sentences composed of a subject and a predicate, we know the meanings of “substance” and “property.” As Aristotle has taught us, a self-existing thing is one that can’t be the property of another thing. If we add the general form of our external sensory experiences (extension in time and space) to the logic of human thought or the grammar of human language, we get events (things that happen in time and space) as well as causation: the idea that things or events can cause (or be the causes of) things or events.

But how do we know that thing or event A is the cause of thing or event B? This kind of knowledge requires regularity or, in other words, natural laws. The PSR implies that every event can be exhaustively described and accounted for in terms of (a) the properties of the things involved and (b) the natural laws through which they are causally related.

Quantum objects, the shapes of things, and the objective fuzziness of spatial relations

As mentioned in a previous post, every thing in visual experience is spatially extended and therefore conceptually divisible by cutting.1 The literal meaning of the Greek word ἄτομος is “uncuttable.” The reason it is usually translated as “indivisible” is that, until quantum mechanics came along, the ultimate parts of material objects were defined by boundaries, while the form of an ultimate part was conceived as the boundary separating a “stuff-filled” inside from an empty outside (imagine three-dimensional cookie cutters).

When the special theory of relativity came along, it became clear that there was no such thing as a rigid body. Spatially extended objects are perforce elastic, and the only feasible way to model their elasticity is in terms of spatially unextended interacting parts.

When quantum mechanics came along, we were forced to conceive of an entirely new kind of thing — a quantum object. When talking about quantum objects, it becomes imperative to distinguish between objects qua individuals and objects qua types. The formal apparatus of quantum mechanics is concerned exclusively with types. An individual quantum object only exists in an experimental context by which it is individuated. As Brigitte Falkenburg has argued convincingly, quantum objects “are only individuated by the experimental apparatus in which they are measured or the concrete quantum phenomenon to which they belong.” In what follows all references to quantum objects are references to quantum objects qua types.

The next thing to know about a quantum object is that its form — insofar as it has one — consists of spatial relations (or relative positions) between unextended parts. Moreover, these spatial relations lack definite (or “sharp”) values; they are “fuzzy.” The proper way of dealing with indefinite/fuzzy things is in terms of probability distributions. However, only in the simplest case of a bipartite object does the sample space — the space over which the probabilities are distributed — have three dimensions. The forms of quantum objects with more than two components “exist” in sample spaces of higher dimensions. But if the form of a quantum object consists of spatial relations between unextended parts, then a quantum object that lacks internal spatial relations also lacks a form. (Such objects are often described, in a grievously inapt phraseology, as “pointlike.”)

The important takeaway here is that the fuzziness associated with the internal spatial relations of a multipartite quantum object is objective. If we have to describe in statistical terms the relative position p(rel) between the electron and the nucleus of a hydrogen atom, it is not because we are ignorant of the exact value of p(rel). There is nothing to be ignorant about. The fuzziness of p(rel) is what fluffs out matter. A material object occupies as much space as it does because the atoms and molecules of which it is compose occupy as much space as they do. And they occupy as much space as they do because their internal spatial relations are fuzzy.

If you don’t find an efficient cause, look for a final cause

How does the essential indefiniteness of spatial relations evince itself in the lab? Quantum experiments typically establish correlations between two procedures, one appropriately named “preparation,” the other rather inappropriately called “measurement.” (The reason the latter term is inappropriate is that the procedure in question generally does more than simply reveal a preexisting property or value.)

Let’s assume (i) that a hydrogen atom is prepared in one of those stationary states — each of which is mathematically represented by a probability distribution p(distr) — and (ii) that what is subsequently “measured” is the exact position of the electron relative to the nucleus (which the electron did not possess prior to the measurement). Let’s further assume, for the sake of argument, that such a measurement can be made. Quantum mechanics then predicts that any given exact position will be obtained with the probability that p(distr) assigns to it.2

The PSR, Marco observes, “becomes controversial in contexts such as quantum mechanics, cosmology, and existential questions.” Nonetheless, even in these contexts he finds it “difficult to believe that something could occur without a cause.” While the claim that a physical event could be entirely causeless strikes him as “deeply implausible,” he concedes that the occurrence of genuinely probabilistic events without deeper deterministic causes is “to a considerable extent accepted among physicists and philosophers of science.”

Now why would that be? For the simple reason that if the outcome of the measurement just outlined were not irreducibly probabilistic, the fuzziness to which p(distr) gives testimony would not be objective, in which case we would have no explanation of why a hydrogen in its ground state is stable, or why atoms and molecules neither explode nor collapse as soon as they are formed, or why it is possible for a material object to enjoy a reasonably stable existence.

Let me lend Marco a hand. Aristotle’s philosophy famously outlines four distinct “causes” or rational explanations — material (the stuff a thing is made of), formal (the kind of thing it is), efficient (what brought it into existence or made it what it is), and final (the purpose it serves). Making it possible for stable material objects to exist appears to me to be a jolly good reason for the irreducibly statistical nature of quantum mechanics. If you don’t find an efficient cause for the existence or truth of something, look for a final cause instead.

Quantum mechanics and the elision of the thinking and perceiving subject

There are several ways in which quantum mechanics can be introduced. By one count there are nine formulations of quantum mechanics,3 each laying down a different set of ground rules, some more philosophically enlightening than others. To my mind, the least enlightening formulation (and the least enlightening set of rules to start with) posits the Schrödinger wave function Ψ with its two modes of evolution — continuous and deterministic between measurements, discontinuous and probabilistic at the time of a measurement.

What this approach gets wrong is the wave function’s dependence on time. Ψ is not something that exists and evolves in time, neither continuously nor discontinuously. The t in Ψ(t) is the time of the measurement to the possible outcomes of which Ψ serves to assign probabilities. Quantum mechanics encapsulates statistical correlations between preparations and measurements (i.e., outcome-indicating or value-indicating events). Farewell, then, to all the futile attempts at explaining the “collapse” of the wave function!

The approach I find most enlightening, which I adopted in my textbook4 and in my classes, also begins by positing two rules. Unlike the two rules of the least enlightening approach (continuous evolution between measurements, “collapse” at the time of a measurement), they lay bare the very heart of quantum mechanics. To Richard Feynman, it was the two-slit experiment with electrons that “has in it the heart of quantum mechanics.” But the reason this experiment has in it the heart of quantum mechanics is that it is the paradigmatic application for these rules. Another paradigmatic application for these rules is this two-particle experiment.

What, then, is the fundamental difference between experimental arrangements in which the first rule applies and experimental arrangements in which the second rule applies? Put as succinctly as possible: if something can happen in two ways, and if the experimental arrangement indicates the way in which it happened, the first rule applies; if on the other hand the experimental arrangement does not indicate the way in which it happened, the second rule applies.

In the two-slit experiment, there are two slits through which an electron can pass. If the first rule applies, the electron has passed through the indicated slit. If the second rule applies, it isn’t the case that it has passed through the left slit, nor is it the case that it has passed through the right slit. The distinction we make between the two possibilities cannot be objectified. If the first rule applies in the two-particle experiment, each initially observed particle is identical with one of the subsequently observed particles. If the second rule applies, there is no answer to the question, “Which initially observed particle is identical with which subsequently observed particle?”

To make sense of this, it is essential that we take the objective world for what it is — a mental construct. If distinctions we make in our minds can be objectified, they form part of the objective world. If they cannot be objectified, they do not.

This is also the point at which the cardinal difference between classical physics and quantum physics becomes patent. Human experience is the universal context of human knowledge. In classical physics every possible distinction — in particular the distinction between two disjoint regions (e.g., the two slit) or the distinction between two particles — can be objectified. This is why the world of classical physics can be de-contextualized. We can ignore our hand in constructing it and pretend that it exists all by itself. The same can’t be done for the world of quantum physics. Because the theory compels us to differentiate between distinctions that are objectifiable and distinctions that are not, the world of quantum physics cannot be de-contextualized from its human origin. Quantum theory does not countenance the elision of the thinking and perceiving subject.

A larger context: the manifestation of the world

This does not mean that we cannot speculate about the larger context. At a minimum we know that reality writ large allows us to objectify our mental constructs (to the extent it does). Quantum physics even offers clues as to its contours. Here are two of them:

• If (in our minds) we keep partitioning physical space, we reach a point at which the distinctions we make between regions cease to be objectifiable. The same goes for the distinction we make between time intervals. The spatiotemporal differentiation of the objectifiable world is therefore incomplete; it does not go “all the way down.”

• If (in our minds) we go on decomposing a physical object, we reach a point at which the distinctions we make between its components cease to be objectifiable. Eventually they become identical in the strong sense of numerical identity. This can be expressed by saying that the number of “ultimate constituents of the universe” is one.

These clues suggest to me that the world cannot be mentally constructed from the bottom up, whether on the basis of an infinitely differentiated spatiotemporal manifold, or by positing a multitude of distinct ultimate parts. The world is manifested from the top down, and this subjectively as well as objectively.

In his later writings, Erwin Schrödinger explains the fact that we all experience one and the same world by positing that “we are all really only various aspects of the One.” To him, the “arithmetical paradox” posed by a multitude of subjects experiencing a single world has only one solution, namely: “the unification of minds or consciousnesses. Their multiplicity is only apparent; in truth there is only one mind. This is the doctrine of the Upanishads. And not only of the Upanishads.”

The Upanishads testify to a descending series of supraphysical worlds, whose subjects grow increasingly distinct. Complementary to the process by which a single subject containing the world becomes a multitude of subjects contained in the world, there occurs a process by which the One qua Being manifests the world we share. We may envision this process as a progression from the undifferentiated unity of the One qua Being to a world which allows itself to be described in the language of everyday discourse. Subatomic particles, non-visualizable atoms, and partly visualizable molecules mark the stages of this progression. Instead of being constituent parts of the manifested world, they are instrumental in its manifestation.

While the objects that populate the manifested world are accessible to direct sensory experience, the quantum objects belonging to the intermediate stages are not. For this reason, concepts which derive their meanings from the spatiotemporal structure of human sensory experience cannot be applied to them. They are “unspeakable” in the language of everyday discourse: “quantum mechanics is neither compatible with the traditional concept of substance (that is, the principle of attributing properties to property carriers) nor with the principle of causality in its usual application to individual systems and processes”.5 What is instrumental in the manifestation of the world can only be spoken of in terms of statistical correlations between events that happen (or could happen) in the manifested world. On the positive side, this goes a long way towards explaining why quantum theory — the general theoretical framework of contemporary physics — is essentially a probability calculus.

Causation in and beyond the world

Marco writes that “the only light at the end of the tunnel I can see lies in Schopenhauer’s idea that the ‘Will’ underlying the world, and thus the will manifest in Nature or, ultimately, the Will of God, is something that does not itself require a cause.” That light I too can see. To this Will, Sri Aurobindo gave the name “Supermind.”

We have to regard ... this all-containing, all-originating, all-consummating Supermind as the nature of the Divine Being, not indeed in its absolute self-existence, but in its action as the Lord and Creator of its own worlds. This is the truth of that which we call God.... The Truth-Consciousness is everywhere present in the universe as an ordering self-knowledge by which the One manifests the harmonies of its infinite potential multiplicity.... [T]he knowledge that creates, because what it creates or releases are forms and powers of itself and not things other than itself, possesses in its own being the vision of the truth and law that governs each potentiality, and along with that an intrinsic awareness of its relation to other potentialities and the harmonies that are possible between them; it holds all this prefigured in the general determining harmony which the whole rhythmic Idea of a universe must contain in its very birth and self-conception and which must therefore inevitably work out by the interplay of its constituents....

This Supermind in its conscious vision not only contains all the forms of itself which its conscious force creates, but it pervades them as an indwelling Presence and a self-revealing Light. It is present, even though concealed, in every form and force of the universe; it is that which determines sovereignly and spontaneously form, force and functioning; it limits the variations it compels; it gathers, disperses, modifies the energy which it uses; and all this is done in accord with the first laws6 that its self-knowledge has fixed in the very birth of the form, at the very starting-point of the force. It is seated within everything as the Lord in the heart of all existences...; it is within them and embraces them as the divine Seer who variously disposed and ordained objects, each rightly according to the thing that it is, from years sempiternal.7 [LD 141–45]

Since Aristotle’s four causes stake out the four kinds of explanation mental consciousness can come up with, it is not hard to map them onto the Vedantic conception of Reality. The One, Brahman, is Sachchidananda — sat or the constituent, material cause of things, chit or the conscious force of Supermind, which is the efficient cause of things, ānanda or the delight of self-experience and self-expression, which is the final cause of things, and the “ordering self-knowledge by which the One manifests the harmonies of its infinite potential multiplicity,” which is the formal cause of things. To our minds these are separate causes, to a supramental consciousness they are mutually implicative aspects of the One.

Marco again:

There may well be facts and forms of causation that transcend the explanatory frameworks of the analytic mind.... However, I would still contend that such phenomena are not therefore simply “causeless.” Rather, they may obey forms of causality fundamentally different from those governing ordinary physical processes and comprehensible to the human mind. Even if these causes remain unfathomable to us mortals, they would still constitute deeper “reasons” or principles underlying the manifestation of events.

Indeed. But if Sachchidananda is the cause of the manifested world or the reason for its existence, then it is also the reason why the laws of physics have the particular form that they do. At bottom, all physical laws encapsulate correlations. Because the laws of classical physics are deterministic, it used to be possible to transmogrify them into physical processes by which causes produce their effects — until quantum physics came along.

As a case in point, consider the familiar story about the propagation of radio signals. When being jiggled, the electrons in antenna A locally act on an all-pervading physical entity known as “the electromagnetic field.” On being jiggled by the electrons, the field acts locally on itself. (Imagine a bucket brigade with infinitely many buckets separated by infinitesimal distances.) In this way the jiggles of the field propagate as an electromagnetic wave, and when they reach the electrons in antenna B, they cause them to jiggle as well. At this point it will be instructive to consider David Mermin’s disillusionment about the explanatory power of classical electromagnetism8:

When I was an undergraduate learning classical electromagnetism, I was enchanted by the revelation that electromagnetic fields were real. Far from being a clever calculational device for how some charged particles push around other charged particles, they were just as real as the particles themselves, most dramatically in the form of electromagnetic waves, which have energy and momentum of their own and can propagate long a er the source that gave rise to them has vanished.

That lovely vision of the reality of the classical electromagnetic field ended when I learned as a graduate student that what Maxwell’s equations actually describe are fields of operators on Hilbert space. Those operators are quantum fields, which most people agree are not real but merely spectacularly successful calculational devices. So real classical electromagnetic fields are nothing more (or less) than a simplification in a particular asymptotic regime (the classical limit) of a clever calculational device. In other words, classical electromagnetic fields are another clever calculational device.

Together with the Lorentz force law, Maxwell’s equations allow us to calculate the effects that charged particles have on charged particles. Even in the context of classical physics, nothing explains how — by what process — physical effects are produced. Nor is such an explanation needed if the force at work in the world is an infinite force. What needs explaining then, and can be explained, is why — to what end — this force works under the particular constraints that it does, or why the laws of physics have the particular form that they do.9 That end is to set the stage for the adventure of evolution. (It is worth emphasizing that the laws of physics do not direct the drama that is played on this stage.)

A final note on entanglement

Quantum entanglement refers to a correlation which exists between simultaneous random events in different locations, and which cannot be accounted for in either of the two explanations that are available to us: direct causation (event A directly increases or decreases the likelihood of event B, or vice versa) or the existence of a common cause (an earlier event C influences the respective likelihoods of both A and B). (You may want to review the introductory remarks to this post regarding a correlation between ice cream consumption and drowning incidents.) The most famous correlation of this type was first discussed by Albert Einstein, Boris Podolsky, and Nathan Rosen in 1935. An equally famous correlation was first discussed half a century later, by Daniel Greenberger, Michael Horne, and Anton Zeilinger.

The profound significant of such entangled random events is that no conceivable cause can explain why they occur. It’s not that we haven’t found their causes. It’s that we know that they don’t exist. According to Marco, “the term ‘random’ is useful as a statistical and epistemic concept, but from a deeper ontological perspective it explains nothing.” It explains nothing because there is nothing that needs to be explained. We know that (and why) these events are random.

Leave a comment

For Berkeley, there are two kinds of things: perceivers (like you, me, and God) and things perceived: Esse est percipi (aut percipere) — to be is to be perceived (or to perceive). The central issues to be resolved by any ontology founded on mind or consciousness is to explain (i) the agreement between our respective “spheres of consciousness” (Schrödinger’s term) and (ii) the predictable evolution of unperceived objects. As the famous limerick goes:

There was a young man who said God,
must think it exceedingly odd
if he finds that the tree
continues to be
when no one’s about in the Quad.

Berkeley’s reply:

Dear Sir, your astonishment’s odd
I am always about in the Quad
And that’s why the tree
continues to be
since observed by, Yours faithfully, God.

God is an infinite, omnipresent mind that continuously perceives the “mighty frame of the world,” thereby ensuring that different perceivers share a coherent world.

Although Berkeley does not appear to have used the term, according to some writers he characterized human knowledge as perspectival. What Berkeley seems to have had in mind was the fact that our perceptions present the world from a particular location within the world, i.e., in perspective. This sets human knowledge apart from God’s knowledge which, by the same token, could be characterized as aperspectival.

Another important attempt to explain the emergence of matter from consciousness was made by Hegel. In Hegel’s system the fundamental reality—Geist (Spirit, Mind, or Reason)—is an all-encompassing consciousness undergoing a process of historical self-actualization. To get this process going, the material world had to be created through a mechanism of externalization or self-alienation. The “Mind of God before the creation of nature” lacked “concreteness.” For Spirit to achieve self-consciousness, it must project itself into its opposite: nature or matter. There, it lies “self-forgetful,” “asleep,” “frozen” and/or “fragmented,” governed by mechanical necessity rather than conscious freedom. Yet even in the rocks, plants, and animals, the rational idea is present, working its way back toward consciousness.

Hegel’s world evolves—if evolution it can be called (see below)—through a process called dialectic. Every successive state of being (the thesis) contains an internal contradiction or limitation, which gives rise to its opposite (the antithesis). The tension between the two is then resolved into a higher level of truth (the synthesis).

For an Aurobindonian like me, there is much here that resonates. The Spirit’s self-alienation, the projection of itself into its opposite by fragmentation, its being present if asleep in matter, working its way back toward full consciousness—what an apt elaboration of Sri Aurobindo’s concept of involution preceding evolution (discussed here, here, here, and here).

Furthermore, Hegel’s dialectic chimes with the following central passage from the first chapter of Sri Aurobindo’s The Life Divine: “For all problems of existence are essentially problems of harmony. They arise from the perception of an unsolved discord and the instinct of an undiscovered agreement or unity.”

When it comes to evolution, however, significant differences emerge. To Sri Aurobindo, what is still involved but bound to evolve is a consciousness way above and beyond Geist (mind or reason). Geist is the limit. To Hegel, there is nothing that reason cannot adjudicate. Or if there is such a thing, it is unworthy of consideration, as for example the biological concept of evolution2:

Nature is to be regarded as a system of grades, of which the one necessarily arises out of the other, and is the proximate truth of the one from which it results—but not so that the one were naturally generated out of the other.… It has been an inept conception of earlier and later ‘Naturphilosophie’ to regard the progression and transition of one natural form and sphere into a higher as an outwardly actual production.… Thinking consideration must deny itself such nebulous, at bottom sensuous, conceptions, as is in especial the so-called origin, for example, of ... the more highly developed animal organizations from the lower.

For Hegel, the endless extravagance of natural production reveals the “impotence of nature,” her powerlessness to keep within the bounds of reason.

In the modern philosophical landscape, Bernardo Kastrup’s Analytic Idealism provides a sophisticated account of the material world’s emergence from a universal consciousness. To explain how it is that within this universal consciousness, this mind-at-large, there exists a multitude of individual minds, Kastrup invokes the psychiatric condition of Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID, formerly known as Multiple Personality Disorder). DID is characterized by the presence of two or more personalities called “alters.” According to Kastrup, we are the dissociated fragments (alters) of a universal mind.

Each of these centers of self-awareness is bounded by something that, Kastrup maintains, can be mathematically modelled as a Markov blanket. This is a logical boundary, not a boundary in space (or spacetime, or some configuration space). What it includes is the mental state of an alter, and what it excludes is the mental contents of mind-at-large that are logically outside the alter’s dissociative boundary.

The mental contents of mind-at-large precede spacetime ontologically, and “whatever reality precedes spacetime ontologically is unreachable by the human intellect.” It follows that “the notions we construct and the conclusions we reach within the framework of spacetime cannot be ultimately true.” If we nevertheless talk about ultimate reality in spatiotemporal terms, it is “a concession to the limitations of thought and language,” which force us to acknowledge that “this dimensional scaffolding is simply a kind of illusion inherently imposed by the structure of our cognition”.3 While “space and time are qualities of experience,” they are qualities only of an alter’s experience, not qualities of experience per se4:

Time exists only insofar as what we call ‘past’ is an experiential quality characteristic of memory and ‘future’ an experiential quality characteristic of imagined possibilities or expectations. Space, in turn, exists only insofar as it is the experiential quality of a certain relationship between perceived objects.

How then does our shared (spatiotemporal/physical) world come into being? It originates within the Markov blanket separating an alter’s mental state r from the mental state ψ of mind-at-large. An alter’s mental state interacts with the mental state of mind-at-large through its sensory state s and its active state a, both of which located within its Markov Blanket.

Inspired by Donald Hoffman’s multimodal user interface theory of perception, Kastrup makes metaphorical use of a modern airplane’s dashboard. While such a dashboard looks nothing like the sky outside the plane, it conveys important information about the sky. By the same token, what is displayed on an alter’s “screen of perception” s is information useful for the alter’s survival, which looks nothing like the “environment” in which the alter survives. This useful information5 is what we believe to be the world in which we live. “Even our language and our very thoughts have evolved to ‘speak dashboard,’ not ‘reality’.”6 Just as for Kant space and time are the pure forms of human intuition (rather than aspects of the world-in-itself), so for Kastrup they are the dimensions of our screens of perceptions.

We interact with ψ not only through our sensory state s but also by means of our effective volitions and intentions, which define our active state a. As indicated by the above diagram, s depends not only on ψ but also on a, and this both indirectly via its effects on ψ and directly. To explain the direct action of a on s, Kastrup makes use the dependence of the value of a quantum observable on the experimental arrangement by which it is measured: the outcome observed (“displayed” on s) depends directly on a course of action we choose (as part of a), to wit, which of a pair of complementary experiments we choose to perform. Conversely, a depends not only on r but also on s, and this indirectly (via the effects of s on r, causing deliberation preceding action) as well as directly. An example of a direct influence of s on a could be the spontaneous and potentially life-saving action one sometimes performs in response to a danger that is perceived and reacted to before it is understood as such.

Having his further reflections subjected to the caveat that talking about ultimate reality in spatiotemporal terms is a concession to the limitations of thought and language, Kastrup proceeds by positing that reality is fundamentally quantum. (As quantum mechanics presupposes the existence either of a configuration space or of spacetime, this can at best be a “penultimate truth.”) Kastrup uses Carlo Rovelli’s relational interpretation of quantum mechanics as the basis for his discussion. Like any interpretation of which I am aware, Rovelli assumes that reality can be partitioned into quantum systems. (Nobody has a convincing explanation of where the boundaries between quantum systems might lie.)

When two quantum systems interact, they usually get “entangled,” which simply means that a measurement performed on one system (by an observer external to both systems) also yields information about the other system. Rovelli gets rid of the external observer. Each of a pair of entangled systems plays the role of an observer relative to the other system. In addition he holds that there are no absolute (i.e., observer-independent) physical properties. Physical properties exist only relative to observers (i.e., if and when they are observed), and the properties existing relative to one observer need not be the same as those existing relative to another observer. In relational quantum mechanics, there is no objective world that is shared by all observers.

Kastrup’s Analytical Idealism offers a possible ontological underpinning for our all but incorrigible belief that we live in a single shared world. If we distinguish between things that possess an inner/mental life and things that don’t, calling the former “living” and the latter “inanimate,” we can maintain that only living things are distinct physical systems. Only they can be carved out of their context. The inanimate universe must be regarded as single, unpartitioned whole. Hence only the inanimate universe as a whole and individual living beings are proper physical systems. Only the inanimate universe and living beings can be observers.

What does the inanimate universe observe? According to Kastrup, “external state ψ is a model of what it is like to be mind-at-large in the process of entertaining conflicting alternatives concurrently in its imagination”.7 In other words, the wave function associated with the inanimate universe represents potential physical properties rather than observationally actualized ones.

Now imagine that alter A observes that p is a property of its private physical world. This observation results from an interaction between the A’s internal state and the external state ψ. Through this interaction the mind-at-large learns that A’s physical world has the property p. Next imagine that alter B performs a measurement designed to determine whether its private physical world has the property p. This measurement is an interaction of the internal state of B with ψ. Because ψ’s knowledge is already correlated with A’s knowledge concerning p, and because B’s knowledge, through this measurement, gets correlated with ψ’s knowledge, B will find its physical world to agree with A’s physical world as far as p is concerned. Voilà.

There is also a more basic reason why the physical worlds of different observers will (or at least can) be mutually consistent. It is that the biological characteristics and the internal mental states of human beings are similar enough to interact with mind-at-large in virtually identical ways.

Having put on my Aurobindonian hat, my first comment addresses the insufficiency of mental consciousness to make sense of the world. Drawing a distinction between the “lower, present and deluding mental Maya” and the “other Maya concealed by this mental,” Sri Aurobindo states that

a world created by mental Maya would ... be an inexplicable paradox and a fixed yet floating nightmare of conscious existence which could neither be classed as an illusion nor as a reality. We have to see that the mind is only an intermediate term between the creative governing knowledge and the soul imprisoned in its works. Sachchidananda, involved by one of His lower movements in the self-oblivious absorption of Force that is lost in the form of her own workings, returns towards Himself out of the self-oblivion; Mind is only one of His instruments in the descent and the ascent. It is an instrument of the descending creation, not the secret creatrix—a transitional stage in the ascent, not our high original source and the consummate term of cosmic existence. [LD 124‒25]

This passage occurs in a chapter titled “The Divine Maya,” wherein Sri Aurobindo explains that

Infinite consciousness in its infinite action can produce only infinite results; to settle upon a fixed Truth or order of truths and build a world in conformity with that which is fixed, demands a selective faculty of knowledge commissioned to shape finite appearance out of the infinite Reality. This power was known to the Vedic seers by the name of Maya.... It is by Maya that static truth of essential being becomes ordered truth of active being — or, to put it in more metaphysical language, out of the supreme being in which all is all without barrier of separative consciousness emerges the phenomenal being in which all is in each and each is in all for the play of existence with existence, consciousness with consciousness, force with force, delight with delight. This play of all in each and each in all is concealed at first from us by the mental play or the illusion of Maya which persuades each that he is in all but not all in him and that he is in all as a separated being not as a being always inseparably one with the rest of existence. Afterwards we have to emerge from this error into the supramental play or the truth of Maya where the “each” and the “all” coexist in the inseparable unity of the one truth and the multiple symbol. [LD123‒24]

In a later chapter titled “Mind and Supermind,” Sri Aurobindo details the steps by which our effectively separate mental consciousnesses emerge from a single original consciousness—the primary, all-comprehending status of the Supermind. (For more on that see this post.) The comprehending supermind is an aperspectival consciousness. In such a consciousness the subject is not situated in space; it encompasses space. The dimensions of a consciousness situated in space—viewer-centered depth and lateral extent—originate in the supermind’s secondary, apprehending status. What we call “physical space” (a.k.a. the “view from nowhere”) is an abstraction from the resulting perspectival experience of the world. It must not be confused with the space that is encompassed by the comprehending supermind:

to a consciousness higher than Mind which should regard our past, present and future in one view, containing and not contained in them, not situated at a particular moment of Time for its point of prospection, Time might well offer itself as an eternal present. And to the same consciousness not situated at any particular point of Space, but containing all points and regions in itself, Space also might well offer itself as a subjective and indivisible extension,—no less subjective than Time. At certain moments we become aware of such an indivisible regard upholding by its immutable self-conscious unity the variations of the universe. But we must not now ask how the contents of Time and Space would present themselves there in their transcendent truth; for this our mind cannot conceive.... [LD 143]

Setting aside that in Sri Aurobindo’s account the original consciousness is supermind, rather than a universal mind, Kastrup’s hypothesis that we are the alters of a single DID-afflicted consciousness seems to me to be quite apt a description of the human condition. After all, since at least the time of the Upanishads, Ignorance—being unaware of our mutual identity, of being the selves of a single Self—has been regarded as the mother of all disorder if not the root of all evil.

I can also appreciate Kastrup’s characterization of space and time as qualitative aspects of our screens of perception. Like Kastrup, I have argued along similar lines that the physical world is a mental construct founded on human experience, and that our physical bodies and brains, qua mental constructs, cannot given rise to conscious experiences or produce mental constructs. I appreciate, too, Kastrup’s account of how it seems that we live in a single objective world (while the reality in which we coexist is something else and altogether beyond mental comprehension). I do, however, think that the same can and should be established in terms of correlations between the experiences of alters, without the mediation of the experience of mind-at-large (which, after all, is beyond mental comprehension).

Where I tend to disagree with Kastrup is when he claims that reality is fundamentally quantum. Quantum mechanics is primarily about one kind of thing only, to wit, statistical correlations between certain human experiences. It is essential that we distinguish between two kinds of correlations between the experiences of alters: those which allow them to construct their shared objective world, and the quantum-mechanical correlations that obtain between property-indicating events (“measurement outcomes”), which occur within this shared objective world.

This does not mean that Niels Bohr was right when he claimed that “the physical content of quantum mechanics is exhausted by its power to formulate statistical laws governing observations obtained under conditions specified in plain language”.8 As I have argued extensively (for instance here), the quantum-mechanical correlations are trying to tell us something. If we think of our shared objective world as a manifested world, they can tell us something about the how of its manifestation. Taken in this sense, I could accede to Kastrup’s premise that reality is fundamentally (or at least penultimately) quantum.

But the manifestation of this world does not take place in a vacuum. This world is manifested to us, in our experience. That is the fundamental fact. All else depends on what we make of our experiences. Concerning the role of quantum mechanics, it is essential that we distinguish between observers and the contexts of their observations. Conflating them is the fundamental flaw of Rovelli’s interpretation and consequently of Kastrup’s as well.

If I observe the moon, I don’t make a quantum-mechanical measurement. I see the moon; it is displayed on my screen of perception. If on the other hand I “observe” an individual electron, I do not observe something I cannot see; I observe a measurement context, an experimental arrangement. Without it, I cannot even speak of an individual quantum system, since it is only a measurement context that can individuate the types of quantum systems with which the formal or axiomatic theory is concerned. Not only does a measurement context define an individual system, it also defines the properties the system can possess. This is why, for a quantum system, no property is possessed unless it is indicated, i.e., unless its possession can be inferred from something that can be seen.

Some smart aleck may now ask: seen by whom? To answer this question, we need to remember that the correlations which allow alters to construct their common objective world exist in an anterior relationship to the quantum-mechanical correlations, which obtain between property-indicating events within this objective world.

We cannot reduce the measurement apparatus to just another quantum system, since its role is to individuate quantum systems as well as to define their possible attributes. This is perfectly analogous to Kastrup’s well-founded insistence that we cannot reduce experiences to electrochemical firing patterns in brains, because electrochemical firing patterns are objectified experiences, and objectified experiences cannot give rise to experiences. As neurons presuppose experience (rather than the other way round), so quantum systems presuppose experimental arrangements (rather than the other way round). Nor does it make sense to assimilate the measurement context into the observing subject, for the former is an object perceived by the latter, not some ill-defined “way of looking.”

I conclude with some comments on Kastrup’s “rationalist spirituality”.9

Why did nature (which to Kastrup is synonymous with mind-at-large) decide to dissociate itself? Making decisions, Kastrup argues, “requires high-level mental functions such as metacognition and the ability to deliberate,” and these functions mind-at-large does not have. But since “everything that can happen in nature, given enough time, eventually does happen,” and since dissociation obviously did happen, “it should come as no surprise that it eventually did.” Hmm.

In spite of this, nature possesses a built-in purpose. This conclusion rests on a number of questionable assumptions—too many in fact to fruitfully engage. The idea is that a universal consciousness, being boundless, would be directly conscious of all there is, in which case distinct individual consciousnesses could not exist. It would “naturally identify itself with whatever it would be directly aware of, which would be all there is.” Given that the conception of the self is derived from contrasting it against something that is not the self, self-awareness would be “logically impossible.” You can probably see where this is going: consciousness “wants” to be self-aware. To become self-aware is its purpose.

Boundless consciousness could only conceive, understand, and become aware of itself if it could experience not being itself as such. It could only conceive, understand, and become aware of its own all-encompassing nature if it could experience limitation. It could only conceive, understand, and become aware of its own unified nature if it could experience fragmentation. Ironically, it seems that only through an illusory confinement of consciousness can nature realize its potential for self-understanding and self-awareness in a process of consciousness enrichment.

What is made possible by fragmentation is “the creation of a foreground/background dynamics in the universe.”

Each individualized consciousness would then have become capable of identifying itself as a foreground in contrast to a background of other natural entities, including other individualized consciousnesses. Only then could the individualized consciousnesses be able to investigate and study the universe itself, thereby becoming progressively more aware of all its aspects. Only then could they, or should I say “we”, understand the laws and entities of nature, its dynamics and, ultimately, its purpose.... Following this line of thought to its natural conclusions, we can infer that our known material reality is the means by which consciousness becomes individualized.... By confining conscious awareness to the indirect models of reality of our intelligence, nature enables a natural process of evolution towards understanding and self-awareness....

As understanding and self-awareness grow, consciousness expands. We see more, in a figurative sense. We understand more of the cause and effect relationships in the universe. We gather more insight about the universe, its properties, and the way it works. Once all potentials are ultimately realized, the illusion of individualization will have served its purpose. At that moment, it is logical to infer, the illusion of fragmentation, individuality, and limits, will be lifted. The universe will be complete in its comprehension and awareness of itself. Its conscious awareness will return to its intrinsic, boundless state of unity, but now enriched with complete understanding and infinite, recursive self-awareness. [emphasis supplied]

In other words, your death is the end of your illusory individual identity. When you die, you will be absorbed into mind-at-large, which will be enriched by your experiences and by those of every other alter that has reached the end of its life10:

[A] living body is what dissociation … in universal consciousness looks like. Therefore, the death and ultimate dissolution of the body can only be the image of the end of the dissociation.... This means that bodily death, under idealism, must correlate with an expansion of our felt sense of identity, access to a broader set of memories and enrichment of our emotional inner life.... If idealism is correct, it implies that, instead of disappearing, conscious inner life expands—whatever new phenomenology this expansion may entail—upon bodily death.

Much of what appears wrong with Kastrup’s version of spirituality—to me, as an Aurobindonian—can be attributed to a single error: the collapsing of reality to the level of mental consciousness. The supramental consciousness—for which Sri Aurobindo also uses the Vedic term “Truth-consciousness”—does not need our “high-level mental functions” to be self-aware (i.e., to be aware of being that which, according to the Upanishads, contains all, is one with all, and is contained in all). The notion that “the conception of the self is derived from contrasting it against something that is not the self” is all but definitional of mental ideation, which works by separating and contrasting.

What Sri Aurobindo in one passage describes as our “little earthly mind that loves to subject even the things that are beyond it to its own norms and standards, its narrow reasonings and erring impressions, its bottomless aggressive ignorance and its petty self-confident knowledge”11 is at its metaphysical best “a subordinate action and instrumentation of the Truth-consciousness.”

So long as it is not separated in self-experience from the enveloping Master-consciousness and does not try to set up house for itself, so long as it serves passively as an instrumentation and does not attempt to possess for its own benefit, Mind fulfils luminously its function which is in the Truth to hold forms apart from each other by a phenomenal, a purely formal delimitation of their activity behind which the governing universality of the being remains conscious and untouched.... It has to uphold an individualisation of active consciousness, delight, force, substance which derives all its power, reality and joy from an inalienable universality behind. It has to turn the multiplicity of the One into an apparent division by which relations are defined and held off against each other so as to meet again and join. It has to establish the delight of separation and contact in the midst of an eternal unity and intermiscence. It has to enable the One to behave as if He were an individual dealing with other individuals but always in His own unity, and this is what the world really is. The mind is the final operation of the apprehending Truth-consciousness which makes all this possible, and what we call the Ignorance does not create a new thing and absolute falsehood but only misrepresents the Truth. The Ignorance is the Mind separated in knowledge from its source of knowledge and giving a false rigidity and a mistaken appearance of opposition and conflict to the harmonious play of the supreme Truth in its universal manifestation. [LD 182‒83]

[The office of Mind] is to translate always infinity into the terms of the finite, to measure off, limit, depiece. Actually it does this in our consciousness to the exclusion of all true sense of the Infinite; therefore Mind is the nodus of the great Ignorance. [LD 174]

There are supraphysical worlds in which mind is overtly a subordinate action and instrumentation of the Truth-consciousness. There are others in which mind is separated in knowledge from its source of knowledge. All of these are non-evolutionary worlds. In our evolutionary physical world, we, like the individuals in their non-evolutionary mental worlds, are separated from mind’s source of knowledge—but only for the time being. For we humans are transitional beings. Just as life once was involved in matter, and mind in life, so supermind is as yet involved in mind, but it is bound to evolve—i.e., to manifest itself in a new race of supramentally conscious beings.

Perhaps the most glaring difference between the spiritual aspect of evolution as conceived by Kastrup and Sri Aurobindo’s concept of spiritual evolution is the role of the individual. In Kastrup’s version, the goal is for a single universal consciousness to attain self-knowledge, which requires a multiple self-limiting individuation. The individuals created for this purpose did not exist before they were created, and they happily disappear into the same single consciousness, like waves into an ocean, when they die. In short, Kastrup’s spiritual evolution is the evolution of a single consciousness, which is complete when all individuals have been re-ingested. (Why does this remind me of the TV show Pluribus?)

There is no better concise formulation of Sri Aurobindo’s concept of spiritual evolution than the following triplet of aphorisms.12

What then was the commencement of the whole matter? Existence that multiplied itself for sheer delight of being and plunged into numberless trillions of forms so that it might find itself innumerably.

And what is the middle? Division that strives towards a multiple unity, ignorance that labours towards a flood of varied light, pain that travails towards the touch of an unimaginable ecstasy. For all these things are dark figures and perverse vibrations.

And what is the end of the whole matter? As if honey could taste itself and all its drops together and all its drops could taste each other and each the whole honeycomb as itself, so should the end be with God and the soul of man and the universe.

But when did existence multiply itself? The key to the answer can be found in this passage:

A manifestation of this kind ... would not seem justifiable if it were imposed on the unwilling creature; but it will be evident that the assent of the embodied spirit must be there already, for Prakriti cannot act without the assent of the Purusha. There must have been not only the will of the Divine Purusha to make the cosmic creation possible, but the assent of the individual Purusha to make the individual manifestation possible. [LD 426]

Individuals preexist their entry into manifestation. We all have embarked on this play of hide and seek, this cycle of involution and evolution, voluntarily and conscious of what it entails. We just forgot, temporarily. As to why we did so, see this page (the passage beginning with “Once in the immortal boundlessness of Self) as well as this page (the passage beginning with “a play of self-concealing and self-finding”). And why did the Divine Purusha embark on this cosmic adventure?

But, apart from this choice of the individual Purusha, there is a deeper truth inherent in the original Existence which finds its expression in the plunge into Inconscience; its result is a new affirmation of Sachchidananda in its apparent opposite. If the Infinite’s right of various self-manifestation is granted, this too as a possibility of its manifestation is intelligible and has its profound significance. [LD 427]

And so, these two conceptions of spiritual evolution agree on at least this point: there was something to be gained from it.

Below are two reports. The first was created by NotebookLM on the basis of the transcript of this video. The second was created by NotebookLM on the basis of this transcript plus the transcripts of the following two videos:

Why You Should Stop Celebrating Those Tankers: The Hidden Crisis in Our Diesel Exports

Watching people wave flags and cheer as massive energy tankers line up in U.S. ports is, quite frankly, frightening. To the casual observer, these ships represent a visual signal of American strength and energy abundance—a sign that relief is on the way to lower the prices that are strangling your household budget. We’ve been conditioned to view a busy port as a win for the home team. But there is a staggering curiosity gap between that patriotic imagery and the cold, hard market reality. While the crowds are celebrating, they are missing a detail that is as clear as day to anyone who actually understands the supply chain: those ships aren’t here to fill our tanks. They are here to empty our reserves. This is a staggering display of economic illiteracy. What you’re actually cheering for is the sound of your own financial security being shipped to the highest bidder overseas.

When a tanker docks, the average person assumes it’s bringing crude oil in to bolster our domestic supply. The reality is the exact opposite, and it’s a punch to the gut of the American consumer. While there’s some crude moving, these ships are primarily here to load up on finished products: diesel, jet fuel, and gasoline. These are the exact refined fuels where global shortages are most acute. It is deeply counter-intuitive for the average citizen to realize that a bustling port actually signifies a drain on domestic availability, but that is the “insider” truth. We are watching the lifeblood of our economy being siphoned off and sent away, yet we treat the spectacle like a victory parade.

There is a direct, undeniable link between this export obsession and the “sticky” inflation that keeps your grocery and utility bills at record highs. The United States has a chronic, systemic problem with exporting excessive amounts of diesel. By prioritizing the global market over domestic stability, we are intentionally keeping our own prices artificially high. This is why inflation feels impossible to beat. Diesel is the primary engine of the global supply chain; when it stays expensive, every single thing it touches—from the field to the shelf—stays expensive. We aren’t just “participating” in the global market; we are sacrificing the American consumer to fatten the margins of energy giants. Diesel prices are one of the largest drivers of inflation, food inflation, just normal goods. And we keep it artificially elevated in the United States to enrich oil companies who sell diesel overseas. By facilitating these record-breaking export levels, our policy-makers are effectively choosing to enrich oil companies at the direct expense of your purchasing power.

The most alarming part of this export surge is the sheer recklessness of the timing. Currently, U.S. diesel inventories are sitting well below the 5-year average. We aren’t exporting from a position of abundance or surplus; we are exporting from a position of depletion. The irony here is almost too much to bear. While the public obsesses over headlines about Iranian oil—a country we don’t even import from—they are cheering for the very ships that are siphoning away the fuel that keeps our own economy afloat. Do you want to know why diesel is currently $1.50 a gallon more than gasoline? Look at the docks. We are intentionally draining our reserves to hit record export numbers while our own domestic supply is in the red. This isn’t just a market trend; it’s a policy that ensures you pay a premium for every good transported across this country.

This crisis doesn’t exist in a vacuum. It is converging with a disaster in the agricultural sector to create a “double whammy” that is going to hit your kitchen table with a vengeance. At the same time we are draining our diesel supply, fertilizer prices have hit prohibitive levels and shortages are becoming widespread. This combination—sky-high fuel costs to run farms and transport goods, paired with scarce, expensive fertilizer—is a ticking time bomb. We are looking at a 3-to-4-month window before these factors converge. When they do, the “celebration” at the ports is going to look like a bitter joke. Celebrating the fact that you’re going broke and you don’t even know it.

In a few months, when the costs are reflected on every receipt and you’re wondering where your paycheck went, you’ll look back at these tankers and see them for what they really are. By then, the ships will be long gone, and the American consumer will be left picking up the tab. I’m telling you what’s coming before it hits the headlines; when it finally does, you’ll realize this was the warning you should have heeded. And for the thousandth time you will say, “Holy ###, he was right.”

Risk Assessment Report: The Maritime Trust Deficit in the Strait of Hormuz

1. The Disconnect Between Political Rhetoric and Operational Reality

In the high-stakes theater of global energy, trust is the fundamental currency upon which stable markets and supply chains are constructed. When a widening chasm emerges between diplomatic pronouncements and the physical movement of cargo, the resulting “trust deficit” destabilizes price discovery and disrupts critical supply corridors. Currently, the Strait of Hormuz—the world’s primary maritime choke point—is characterized by an acute disconnect where political signaling attempts to mask a profound breakdown in operational security. Markets do not respond to aspirations; they respond to the verifiable confidence that a vessel can transit a waterway without the risk of seizure or destruction.

The following table illustrates the divergence between official signaling and the ground truth as of May 2026:

This instability is aggravated by uncoordinated “jawboning” tactics from both administrations. The U.S. administration’s penchant for claiming immediate diplomatic victories is met with Iranian assertions that the Strait is not run in “cyberspace” but in the “physical world”. This messaging friction prevents the stabilization of oil prices, as insurance markets and shipping conglomerates refuse to base multi-billion dollar risks on contradictory political theater.

2. Physical and Structural Barriers to Maritime Transit

A “political opening” is functionally irrelevant in the absence of a stable military and insurance environment. Maritime control is a physical reality, and the current mechanics of transit are governed by imminent threat rather than diplomatic treaty. Every tanker captain is currently facing a “billion-dollar gamble,” forced to risk crew and cargo in a corridor where the rules of engagement are entirely opaque. The physical risks preventing the resumption of normal transit include:

● The U.S. Naval Blockade: Despite claims of an open waterway, the U.S. continues to enforce a naval blockade. Iran maintains that the Strait is operationally closed so long as this blockade remains in place.

● Revolutionary Guard Oversight: Iran has mandated that all passing vessels receive direct approval from the Revolutionary Guard and utilize designated lanes under their control, effectively turning a global waterway into a restricted military zone.

● Tactical Risks: The environment remains lethal. Hazards include the documented presence of mines, the threat of missile strikes, and the persistent risk of vessel seizure.

● The Monday Ceasefire Deadline: The current transit window is temporary. The existing ceasefire is scheduled to expire this coming Monday, meaning any perceived “opening” is a fleeting pause rather than a systemic restoration of trade.These physical risks necessitate security guarantees that cannot be provided by social media declarations or diplomatic “words” alone. Consequently, the financial markets have begun to price in a prolonged state of maritime paralysis.

3. Financial Market Volatility and the Manipulation Layer

Professional traders and sovereign risk analysts prioritize “market scent” over political headlines. While announcements may trigger short-term algorithmic price drops, the physical-political disconnect forces prices back up as the lack of operational progress becomes undeniable. This volatility is further compounded by clear indicators of market manipulation.

● The “Pump and Dump” Indicators: Data suggests a significant $750–$ 800 million oil short occurred immediately prior to recent “calming” headlines. This indicates that specific actors are capitalizing on the predictable cycle of administrative messaging to profit from manufactured price swings.

● Price Signal Inversion: A stark contradiction exists between physical oil prices and the futures market. While physical prices remain high due to scarcity and risk, the futures market has been depressed, creating a structural inhibitor to long-term investment.

● Regulatory Skepticism: While the Federal Commodities Trading Commission (CFTC) has announced an investigation into this manipulation, there is profound skepticism regarding the administration’s willingness to regulate its own messaging environment. This “high-stakes game of chicken” between the U.S. and Iran—where the U.S. attempts to apply pressure without triggering escalation—creates a noise-filled environment that obscures fundamental price discovery.

4. The U.S. Energy Sector: Discipline Over Dominance

Despite record-high price signals that would historically trigger a domestic drilling boom, the U.S. energy sector has remained unresponsive. Rig counts have not increased since the onset of the conflict, signaling a transition from “growth at all costs” to a framework of strict “financial discipline”. The structural reasons for this refusal to expand include:

1. The Wall Street “Leash”: Traditional “oil men” have been largely superseded by financial managers who prioritize shareholder primacy. Capital allocation frameworks now favor returning cash to shareholders via dividends and buybacks over aggressive production expansion.

2. The Futures Market Barrier: To initiate new drilling, companies require the ability to “hedge” production. The May 2027 futures contract (currently one year away) is trading below $65—a price point that fails to provide the guaranteed returns necessary for Wall Street to approve new rigs.

3. Production Decline: U.S. oil production peaked in September and has maintained a steady decline for six consecutive months. Furthermore, there is a deep-seated distrust of the administration’s energy messaging. The industry views “Energy Dominance” as a political narrative contradicted by the President’s own actions, such as requesting production increases from OPEC. This idiosyncratic political risk discourages long-term domestic expansion.

5. Downstream Consequences: Supply Chains and Inflationary Pressure

The domestic energy landscape is currently defined by an irrational systemic contradiction: the U.S. is exporting record volumes of diesel, jet fuel, and gasoline while domestic inventories remain critically low. This strategy prioritizes the enrichment of energy majors over the stability of the domestic consumer.

● Diesel Inventory Shortages: Domestic diesel levels are currently trending well below the five-year average.

● Export Strategies: Exporting diesel to capture global premiums keeps domestic prices artificially high, serving as a primary driver of “sticky” inflation in food and consumer goods.

● Infrastructure Damage and Refining Loss: Assessments indicate approximately $80 billion in damage to Middle Eastern oil and gas infrastructure, resulting in a loss of 5 million barrels per day in refining capacity.

● The Corporate Disconnect: While the middle class faces soaring costs, energy majors like Chevron have issued insulting guidance, suggesting consumers “drive less” or “take shorter showers” to manage the $1,200 electric bills and high fuel costs they helped generate. The scale of infrastructure damage ensures that even a successful political “opening” of the Strait will not facilitate an immediate return to pre-war supply levels.

6. Strategic Outlook and Conclusions

The current state of the Strait of Hormuz is a manufactured illusion of openness. In the “physical world,” the waterway is controlled, contained, and untrusted. The failure to align political rhetoric with operational security has created a systemic deadlock that cannot be resolved through performative diplomacy.

● The Strait of Hormuz is not run in cyberspace; it is run in the physical world where security guarantees and time—not words—are the only path to restoration.

● U.S. energy production is in a six-month decline as Wall Street’s leash ensures shareholder dividends take priority over the political narrative of “energy dominance.”

● The $80 billion in infrastructure damage and 5 million barrel per day refining loss ensure that this crisis will have a prolonged tail, regardless of ceasefire deadlines.

The primary risk factor to global stability remains the negotiation process itself. Characterized by administrative incompetence, ego-driven “jawboning,” and fantastical claims, the current diplomatic approach is a “cluster” that has failed to deliver the clarity required by global markets. Until a baseline of normalcy and factual integrity is restored, the maritime trust deficit will continue to drive economic volatility and systemic hardship.

Here is another favorite of mine (there aren’t that many):

Map the World by Bilawal Sidhu

How These Satellites See What Cameras Can't.

Imagine it’s 2 AM in Eastern Europe. Overcast, no moon in the sky. A column of vehicles is moving across an unlit road. There’s a thick cloud layer sitting at 3,000 feet. To anyone watching from space with a normal camera, that road is empty…

Read more

4 months ago · 21 likes · 4 comments · Bilawal Sidhu

The traditions of the past are very great in their own place—in the past; but I do not see why we should merely repeat them and not go farther. In the spiritual development of the consciousness upon earth the great past ought to be followed by a greater future. — Sri Aurobindo, Letters on Yoga—II, p. 480.

In reply to a comment to my last piece by AI (his initials, not an alien intelligence), I posted passages from Chapter VIII of Book 1 of Sri Aurobindo’s The Life Divine, titled “The Methods of Vedantic Knowledge.” Re-reading the chapter and AI’s reply, I was struck again by Sri Aurobindo’s use of the wisdom of ancient scripture (notably the Rig Veda, the Upanishads, and the Bhagavad Gita), a wisdom which had lain buried under layers of increasingly shallow partisan readings, and which Sri Aurobindo did more than anybody else to uncover and make intelligible to the oh so enlightened modern mind. To him these scriptures were steppingstones, which he treated with the deep respect that one owes to steppingstones. His purpose was to build something new, and not just a wider knowledge for knowledge’s sake but a vaster vision for a greater being. As he wrote in the Arya (issue of November 1918),

Knowledge does not end with knowing, nor is it pursued and found for the sake of knowing alone. It has its full value only when it leads to some greater gain than itself, some gain of being.... A greater knowledge opens the possibility and, if really possessed, brings the actuality of a greater being. [Kena and Other Upanishads, p. 154.]

Moreover, and conversely, the value of a knowledge systems depends on the purpose it serves. In describing the system of supraphysical worlds, for example, Sri Aurobindo stated explicitly that he followed “consistently the Vedic and Vedantic arrangement of which we find the great lines in the Upanishads, first because it seems to me at once the simplest and most philosophical and more especially because it was from the beginning envisaged from the point of view of the utility of these various planes to the supreme object of our liberation” [The Synthesis of Yoga, p. 448].

What follows are excerpts from “The Methods of Vedantic Knowledge.” These should be required reading for those advocates of spirituality who, seeing our contemporary knowledge—our knowing more and more about less and less—as a loss, plead for a return to a supposedly wiser past.

In reality, all experience is in its secret nature knowledge by identity; but its true character is hidden from us because we have separated ourselves from the rest of the world by exclusion, by the distinction of ourself as subject and everything else as object, and we are compelled to develop processes and organs by which we may again enter into communion with all that we have excluded. We have to replace direct knowledge through conscious identity by an indirect knowledge which appears to be caused by physical contact and mental sympathy. This limitation is a fundamental creation of the ego and an instance of the manner in which it has proceeded throughout, starting from an original falsehood and covering over the true truth of things by contingent falsehoods which become for us practical truths of relation.

From this nature of mental and sense knowledge as it is at present organised in us, it follows that there is no inevitable necessity in our existing limitations. They are the result of an evolution in which mind has accustomed itself to depend upon certain physiological functionings and their reactions as its normal means of entering into relation with the material universe. Therefore, although it is the rule that when we seek to become aware of the external world, we have to do so indirectly through the sense-organs and can experience only so much of the truth about things and men as the senses convey to us, yet this rule is merely the regularity of a dominant habit. It is possible for the mind—and it would be natural for it, if it could be persuaded to liberate itself from its consent to the domination of matter—to take direct cognisance of the objects of sense without the aid of the sense-organs.... Because our waking consciousness is determined and limited by the balance between mind and matter worked out by life in its evolution, this direct cognisance is usually impossible in our ordinary waking state and has therefore to be brought about by throwing the waking mind into a state of sleep which liberates the true or subliminal mind. Mind is then able to assert its true character as the one and all-sufficient sense and free to apply to the objects of sense its pure and sovereign instead of its mixed and dependent action. Nor is this extension of faculty really impossible but only more difficult in our waking state—as is known to all who have been able to go far enough in certain paths of psychological experiment....

If then we can extend our faculty of mental self-awareness to awareness of the Self beyond and outside us, Atman or Brahman of the Upanishads, we may become possessors in experience of the truths which form the contents of the Atman or Brahman in the universe. It is on this possibility that Indian Vedanta has based itself. It has sought through knowledge of the Self the knowledge of the universe.

But always mental experience and the concepts of the reason have been held by it to be even at their highest a reflection in mental identifications and not the supreme self-existent identity. We have to go beyond the mind and the reason. The reason active in our waking consciousness is only a mediator between the subconscient All that we come from in our evolution upwards and the superconscient All towards which we are impelled by that evolution. The subconscient and the superconscient are two different formulations of the same All. The master-word of the subconscient is Life, the master-word of the superconscient is Light. In the subconscient knowledge or consciousness is involved in action, for action is the essence of Life. In the superconscient action re-enters into Light and no longer contains involved knowledge but is itself contained in a supreme consciousness. Intuitional knowledge is that which is common between them and the foundation of intuitional knowledge is conscious or effective identity between that which knows and that which is known; it is that state of common self-existence in which the knower and the known are one through knowledge. But in the subconscient the intuition manifests itself in the action, in effectivity, and the knowledge or conscious identity is either entirely or more or less concealed in the action. In the superconscient, on the contrary, Light being the law and the principle, the intuition manifests itself in its true nature as knowledge emerging out of conscious identity, and effectivity of action is rather the accompaniment or necessary consequent and no longer masks as the primary fact. Between these two states reason and mind act as intermediaries which enable the being to liberate knowledge out of its imprisonment in the act and prepare it to resume its essential primacy. When the self-awareness in the mind applied both to continent and content, to own-self and other-self, exalts itself into the luminous self-manifest identity, the reason also converts itself into the form of the self-luminous intuitional1 knowledge. This is the highest possible state of our knowledge when mind fulfils itself in the supramental.

Such is the scheme of the human understanding upon which the conclusions of the most ancient Vedanta were built.

Sad Brahman, Existence pure, indefinable, infinite, absolute, is the last concept at which Vedantic analysis arrives in its view of the universe, the fundamental Reality which Vedantic experience discovers behind all the movement and formation which constitute the apparent reality. It is obvious that when we posit this conception, we go entirely beyond what our ordinary consciousness, our normal experience contains or warrants. The senses and sense-mind know nothing whatever about any pure or absolute existence.... At the most in the phenomenon of self-awareness or behind it, we get sometimes a glimpse of something immovable and immutable, something that we vaguely perceive or imagine that we are beyond all life and death, beyond all change and formation and action. Here is the one door in us that sometimes swings open upon the splendour of a truth beyond and, before it shuts again, allows a ray to touch us—a luminous intimation which, if we have the strength and firmness, we may hold to in our faith and make a starting-point for another play of consciousness than that of the sense-mind, for the play of Intuition.

For if we examine carefully, we shall find that Intuition is our first teacher. Intuition always stands veiled behind our mental operations. Intuition brings to man those brilliant messages from the Unknown which are the beginning of his higher knowledge. Reason only comes in afterwards to see what profit it can have of the shining harvest. Intuition gives us that idea of something behind and beyond all that we know and seem to be which pursues man always in contradiction of his lower reason and all his normal experience and impels him to formulate that formless perception in the more positive ideas of God, Immortality, Heaven and the rest by which we strive to express it to the mind. For Intuition is as strong as Nature herself from whose very soul it has sprung and cares nothing for the contradictions of reason or the denials of experience. It knows what is because it is, because itself it is of that and has come from that, and will not yield it to the judgment of what merely becomes and appears. What the Intuition tells us of, is not so much Existence as the Existent, for it proceeds from that one point of light in us which gives it its advantage, that sometimes opened door in our own self-awareness. Ancient Vedanta seized this message of the Intuition and formulated it in the three great declarations of the Upanishads, “I am He”, “Thou art That, O Swetaketu”, “All this is the Brahman; this Self is the Brahman”.

But Intuition by the very nature of its action in man, working as it does from behind the veil, active principally in his more unenlightened, less articulate parts, served in front of the veil, in the narrow light which is our waking conscience, only by instruments that are unable fully to assimilate its messages—Intuition is unable to give us the truth in that ordered and articulated form which our nature demands. Before it could effect any such completeness of direct knowledge in us, it would have to organise itself in our surface being and take possession there of the leading part. But in our surface being it is not the Intuition, it is the Reason which is organised and helps us to order our perceptions, thoughts and actions. Therefore the age of intuitive knowledge, represented by the early Vedantic thinking of the Upanishads, had to give place to the age of rational knowledge; inspired Scripture made room for metaphysical philosophy, even as afterwards metaphysical philosophy had to give place to experimental Science. Intuitive thought which is a messenger from the superconscient and therefore our highest faculty, was supplanted by the pure reason which is only a sort of deputy and belongs to the middle heights of our being; pure reason in its turn was supplanted for a time by the mixed action of the reason which lives on our plains and lower elevations and does not in its view exceed the horizon of the experience that the physical mind and senses or such aids as we can invent for them can bring to us.

We see this succession in the Upanishads and the subsequent Indian philosophies. We see this succession in the Upanishads and the subsequent Indian philosophies. The sages of the Veda and Vedanta relied entirely upon intuition and spiritual experience. It is by an error that scholars sometimes speak of great debates or discussions in the Upanishad. Wherever there is the appearance of a controversy, it is not by discussion, by dialectics or the use of logical reasoning that it proceeds, but by a comparison of intuitions and experiences in which the less luminous gives place to the more luminous, the narrower, faultier or less essential to the more comprehensive, more perfect, more essential. The question asked by one sage of another is “What dost thou know?”, not “What dost thou think?” nor “To what conclusion has thy reasoning arrived?” Nowhere in the Upanishads do we find any trace of logical reasoning urged in support of the truths of Vedanta. Intuition, the sages seem to have held, must be corrected by a more perfect intuition; logical reasoning cannot be its judge.

And yet the human reason demands its own method of satisfaction. Therefore when the age of rationalistic speculation began, Indian philosophers, respectful of the heritage of the past, adopted a double attitude towards the Truth they sought. They recognised in the Sruti, the earlier results of Intuition or, as they preferred to call it, of inspired Revelation, an authority superior to Reason. But at the same time they started from Reason and tested the results it gave them, holding only those conclusions to be valid which were supported by the supreme authority. In this way they avoided to a certain extent the besetting sin of metaphysics, the tendency to battle in the clouds because it deals with words as if they were imperative facts instead of symbols which have always to be carefully scrutinised and brought back constantly to the sense of that which they represent. Their speculations tended at first to keep near at the centre to the highest and profoundest experience and proceeded with the united consent of the two great authorities, Reason and Intuition. Nevertheless, the natural trend of Reason to assert its own supremacy triumphed in effect over the theory of its subordination. Hence the rise of conflicting schools each of which founded itself in theory on the Veda and used its texts as a weapon against the others. For the highest intuitive Knowledge sees things in the whole, in the large and details only as sides of the indivisible whole; its tendency is towards immediate synthesis and the unity of knowledge. Reason, on the contrary, proceeds by analysis and division and assembles its facts to form a whole; but in the assemblage so formed there are opposites, anomalies, logical incompatibilities, and the natural tendency of Reason is to affirm some and to negate others which conflict with its chosen conclusions so that it may form a flawlessly logical system. The unity of the first intuitional knowledge was thus broken up and the ingenuity of the logicians was always able to discover devices, methods of interpretation, standards of varying value by which inconvenient texts of the Scripture could be practically annulled and an entire freedom acquired for their metaphysical speculation.

Nevertheless, the main conceptions of the earlier Vedanta remained in parts in the various philosophical systems and efforts were made from time to time to recombine them into some image of the old catholicity and unity of intuitional thought. And behind the thought of all, variously presented, survived as the fundamental conception, Purusha, Atman or Sad Brahman, the pure Existent of the Upanishads, often rationalised into an idea or psychological state, but still carrying something of its old burden of inexpressible reality. What may be the relation of the movement of becoming which is what we call the world to this absolute Unity and how the ego, whether generated by the movement or cause of the movement, can return to that true Self, Divinity or Reality declared by the Vedanta, these were the questions speculative and practical which have always occupied the thought of India.

Dario Amodei1 told back in February that a tsunami is coming, so close we can see it on the horizon, yet people are inventing explanations for why it is a trick of the light. Anthropic’s official position is that powerful AI systems matching Nobel laureates across most disciplines will emerge in late 2026 or early 2027. A country of geniuses in a data centre. Months away.

Now hold that timeline in one hand and hold the last thirty days of human civilisation in the other.

In thirty days, humanity demonstrated that it still cannot keep a 39-kilometre strait open. That its most advanced medical imaging depends on a gas boiling off in containers nobody can reach. That three billion people’s food supply routes through a chokepoint a single insurance market can close. That its most expensive aircraft can be destroyed by drones costing less than a used car. That a gas field discovered in 1971 still determines whether semiconductor fabs operate in 2026. The molecule, the most ancient unit of physical reality, remains the binding constraint on the most advanced technological civilisation ever constructed.

This is the gap Dario is describing, and it is more profound than his framing suggests. The tsunami is not merely that AI is approaching human-level intelligence. The tsunami is that AI is approaching human-level intelligence at the precise moment when human-level intelligence has proven insufficient to manage the physical systems it built. We constructed a global economy of extraordinary complexity, interlinked through chokepoints of extraordinary fragility, with eight billion minds available to notice the risk. Nobody noticed. Nobody priced it. Nobody mapped the seven industries running through one reservoir until the missiles made the map undeniable.

The question this raises is not whether AI will be as smart as a Nobel laureate. It is whether being as smart as a Nobel laureate is sufficient.

The engineers who designed Ras Laffan were brilliant. The metallurgists who built the cryogenic heat exchangers are world-class. The actuaries who structured the insurance market created an elegant system. Each node is a masterpiece of human intelligence. The failure is not in any node. It is in the connections between nodes that no individual mind was tasked with mapping. The failure is architectural, not intellectual.

Dario wrote2 that powerful AI could compress a century of biological progress into a decade, and that we are in a period where capability outruns wisdom, like a teenager with a car but no judgment. The Iran war adds the dimension neither essay anticipated: the teenager has discovered that the roads themselves are built on a single bridge, and the bridge is on fire, and the fire truck runs on the same fuel that flows under it.

Read that again:

AI is approaching human-level intelligence at the precise moment when human-level intelligence has proven insufficient to manage the physical systems it built. We constructed a global economy of extraordinary complexity, interlinked through chokepoints of extraordinary fragility, with eight billion minds available to notice the risk. Nobody noticed. Nobody priced it. Nobody mapped the seven industries running through one reservoir until the missiles made the map undeniable.... The question this raises is not whether AI will be as smart as a Nobel laureate. It is whether being as smart as a Nobel laureate is sufficient.

Most readers of this substack will know why it’s called “Aurocafe,” and why the root of the problem is the mental constitution of human consciousness. But some who have more recently subscribed to Aurocafe or somehow stumbled upon this post will want to know what is meant by “the mental constitution of human consciousness” and why it’s the root of the problem. The following snippet points to the problem and hints at the solution:

Mental nature and mental thought are based on a consciousness of the finite; supramental nature is in its very grain a consciousness and power of the Infinite. Supramental Nature sees everything from the standpoint of oneness and regards all things, even the greatest multiplicity and diversity, even what are to the mind the strongest contradictions, in the light of that oneness; its will, ideas, feelings, sense are made of the stuff of oneness, its actions proceed upon that basis. Mental Nature, on the contrary, thinks, sees, wills, feels, senses with division as a starting-point and has only a constructed understanding of unity.

This text is from the penultimate chapter of The Life Divine by Sri Aurobindo. In this chapter Sri Aurobindo makes an attempt to describe to us mentally conscious beings the consciousness and nature of a supramental gnostic being. Before addressing these unfamiliar terms and concepts, let’s take a step back and consider who we are talking about. For readers completely unfamiliar with Sri Aurobindo, here is a sketch of his life up to the day (in 1910) when he arrived in the (then) French enclave of Pondicherry in Southern India, where he remained until his passing in 1950.

Sri Aurobindo originally thought to return to politics in a year or two. But before long “the magnitude of the spiritual work set before him became more and more clear to him”.3 It was no longer a question of “revolt against the British government; he was now waging a revolt against the whole universal Nature”.4 This is not the place to discuss Sri Aurobindo’s 40-year-long revolt against universal Nature. Suffice it to quote him on the sources of his “philosophy”5:

My philosophy was formed first by the study of the Upanishads and the Gita; the Veda came later. They were the basis of my first practice of Yoga; I tried to realise what I read in my spiritual experience and succeeded; in fact I was never satisfied till experience came and it was on this experience that later on I founded my philosophy, not on ideas by themselves. I owed nothing in my philosophy to intellectual abstractions, ratiocination or dialectics; when I have used these means it was simply to explain my philosophy and justify it to the intellect of others. The other source of my philosophy was the knowledge that flowed from above when I sat in meditation, especially from the plane of the Higher Mind when I reached that level; they [the ideas from the Higher Mind] came down in a mighty flood which swelled into a sea of direct Knowledge always translating itself into experience, or they were intuitions starting from experience and leading to other intuitions and a corresponding experience. This source was exceedingly catholic and many-sided and all sorts of ideas came in which might have belonged to conflicting philosophies but they were here reconciled in a large synthetic whole.

He also wrote that he “never, never, never was a philosopher”: “I had only to write down in the terms of the intellect all that I had observed and come to know in practising Yoga daily and the philosophy was there, automatically. But that is not being a philosopher!”6 Needless to say, by “Yoga” Sri Aurobindo did not mean an exercise cult with expensive accessories. Read this post if you want to know what he had in mind.

One pillar of Sri Aurobindo’s philosophy is the conception of a supramental consciousness or supermind. This is how the term is introduced in The Life Divine:

“In the beginning,” says the Vedanta [the philosophy of the Upanishads], “was the one Existence without a second,” but before and after the beginning, now, for ever and beyond Time is that which we cannot describe even as the One, even when we say that nothing but That is. What we can be aware of is, first, its original self-concentration which we endeavour to realise as the indivisible One; secondly, the diffusion and apparent disintegration of all that was concentrated in its unity which is the Mind’s conception of the universe; and thirdly, its firm self-extension in the Truth-consciousness which contains and upholds the diffusion and prevents it from being a real disintegration, maintains unity in utmost diversity and stability in utmost mutability, insists on harmony in the appearance of an all-pervading strife and collision, keeps eternal cosmos where Mind would arrive only at a chaos eternally attempting to form itself. This is the Supermind, the Truth-consciousness, the Real-Idea which knows itself and all that it becomes. [pp. 136‒37]

A second pillar of Sri Aurobindo’s philosophy is his concept of involution. The One—described by the Upanishads as a trinity of Being, Consciousness, and Bliss—has involved or imprisoned itself Houdini-like in insentient matter, wherefrom it has emerged, thus far, in the forms of life (vital force) and mind (mental consciousness). But mentally conscious homo sapiens, far from being the crown and culmination of Nature’s evolutionary nisus, is a transitional being7:

[M]an is essentially a journeyman. He is skilful in putting things [up], buildings, a job, a swindle. In pulling down he is perfect, a destroyer ne plus ultra. The world is full of his constructions, but more pervasive is his destruction; but that leaves few traces. But still the great doers are few in number, the good doers are many, the poor doers are legion, the evil doers hardly less. All this shows that he is a transitional and evolving animal.

To Sri Aurobindo, the eventual emergence of a species of supramentally conscious beings is a foregone conclusion: it “is an inevitable necessity in the logic of things and is therefore sure. It is because people do not understand what the supermind is or realise the significance of the emergence of consciousness in a world of ‘inconscient’ Matter that they are unable to realise this inevitability”.8 But there is a flipside9:

It is a spiritual, a greater than the rational enlightenment that can alone illumine the vital nature of man and impose harmony on its self-seekings, antagonisms and discords.... For so only can egoism disappear and the true individualism of the unique godhead in each man found itself on the true communism of the equal godhead in the race.... This is a solution to which it may be objected that it puts off the consummation of a better human society to a far-off date in the future evolution of the race. For it means that ... an inner change is needed in human nature, a change too difficult to be ever effected except by the few. This is not certain; but in any case, if this is not the solution, then there is no solution, if this is not the way, then there is no way for the human kind. Then the terrestrial evolution must pass beyond man as it has passed beyond the animal and a greater race must come that will be capable of the spiritual change, a form of life must be born that is nearer to the divine.

This was written during the first World War. At the beginning of the second World War, Sri Aurobindo re-stated his position10:

It is only the full emergence of the soul, the full descent of the native light and power of the Spirit and the consequent replacement or transformation and uplifting of our insufficient mental and vital nature by a spiritual and supramental supernature that can effect this evolutionary miracle.

At first sight this insistence on a radical change of nature might seem to put off all the hope of humanity to a distant evolutionary future; for the transcendence of our normal human nature, a transcendence of our mental, vital and physical being, has the appearance of an endeavour too high and difficult and at present, for man as he is, impossible. Even if it were so, it would still remain the sole possibility for the transmutation of life; for to hope for a true change of human life without a change of human nature is an irrational and unspiritual proposition; it is to ask for something unnatural and unreal, an impossible miracle. But what is demanded by this change is not something altogether distant, alien to our existence and radically impossible; for what has to be developed is there in our being and not something outside it: what evolutionary Nature presses for, is an awakening to the knowledge of self, the discovery of self, the manifestation of the self and spirit within us and the release of its self-knowledge, its self-power, its native self-instrumentation. It is, besides, a step for which the whole of evolution has been a preparation and which is brought closer at each crisis of human destiny when the mental and vital evolution of the being touches a point where intellect and vital force reach some acme of tension and there is a need either for them to collapse, to sink back into a torpor of defeat or a repose of unprogressive quiescence or to rend their way through the veil against which they are straining.

Ten years later, in 1950, one can sense a greater urgency11:

If man is intended to survive and carry forward the evolution of which he is at present the head and, to some extent, a half-conscious leader of its march, he must come out of his present chaotic international life and arrive at a beginning of organised united action…. The question now put by evolving Nature to mankind is whether its existing international system, if system it can be called, a sort of provisional order maintained with constant evolutionary or revolutionary changes, cannot be replaced by a willed and thought-out fixed arrangement, a true system, eventually a real unity serving all the common interests of the earth’s peoples…. It is for the men of our day and, at the most, of tomorrow to give the answer. For, too long a postponement or too continued a failure will open the way to a series of increasing catastrophes which might create a too prolonged and disastrous confusion and chaos and render a solution too difficult or impossible; it might even end in something like an irremediable crash not only of the present world-civilisation but of all civilisation. A new, a difficult and uncertain beginning might have to be made in the midst of the chaos and ruin after perhaps an extermination on a large scale, and a more successful creation could be predicted only if a way was found to develop a better humanity or perhaps a greater, a superhuman race.

Earlier in the same chapter, Sri Aurobindo considers the possibility of a third World War. (The last time I quoted this passage, I wrote that it wouldn’t be the last time!)

If the third war ... does come, it is likely to precipitate as inevitably a further step and perhaps the final outcome of this great world-endeavour [towards Human Unity].12 Nature uses such means, apparently opposed and dangerous to her intended purpose, to bring about the fruition of that purpose. As in the practice of the spiritual science and art of Yoga one has to raise up the psychological possibilities which are there in the nature and stand in the way of its spiritual perfection and fulfilment so as to eliminate them, even, it may be, the sleeping possibilities which might arise in future to break the work that has been done, so too Nature acts with the world-forces that meet her on her way, not only calling up those which will assist her but raising too, so as to finish with them, those that she knows to be the normal or even the unavoidable obstacles which cannot but start up to impede her secret will. [Ibid, pp. 580‒81]

So that’s where we are, and that’s what is at stake.

We’re letting big corporations gamble with our lives. Act now, or the food could run out

By George Monbiot, The Guardian, Wed 25 Mar 2026

The fragility of the global food system fills me with dread—and the war with Iran has exposed just how close to collapse it is

The fate of environmentalists is to spend their lives trying not to be proved right. Vindication is what we dread. But there’s one threat that haunts me more than any other: the collapse of the global food system. We cannot predict what the immediate trigger might be. But the war with Iran is just the right kind of event.

Drawing on years of scientific data,1,2,3 I’ve been arguing for some time that this risk exists—and that governments are completely unprepared for it. In 2023, I made a submission4 to a parliamentary inquiry into environmental change and food security,5 with a vast list of references. Called as a witness, I spent much of the time explaining6 that the issue was much wider than the inquiry’s scope.

While some MPs got it, governments as a whole simply don’t seem to understand what we’re facing. It’s this: the global food system is systemically fragile in the same way that the global financial system was before the 2008 crash.

It’s easy to see potential vulnerabilities, such as a fertiliser supply crunch7 caused by the closure of the strait of Hormuz, or harvest failures8 caused by climate breakdown. But these are not the thing itself. They are disruptions of the kind that might trigger the thing. The thing itself is the entire system sliding off a cliff. The same factors that would have brought down the financial system, were it not for a bailout amounting to trillions of dollars, now threaten to bring down the food system.

Recent data suggests that every part of this system is now highly concentrated9 in the hands of a few corporations, which have been consolidating10 both vertically and horizontally. One recent study found that11 the US food system has “consolidated nearly twice as much as the overall economic system”. Some of these corporations, diversifying into financial products, now look more like banks12 than commodity traders, but without the same level of regulation. They might claim that financialisation helps them hedge against risk, but as one paper remarks,13 “it is nearly impossible to differentiate between hedging and speculating.” We don’t know how exposed to risk they might be, but it doesn’t look great.14 Partly through their influence, the world has shifted towards a “global standard diet”, supplied by the global standard farm.

These vulnerabilities are exacerbated by the use of just-in-time supply chains and the funnelling of much of the world’s trade through a number of chokepoints. Some people15 have long warned16 that the strait of Hormuz, alongside the Suez canal, Turkish straits, Panama canal and straits of Malacca, are critical chokepoints, whose obstruction would threaten the flow of food, fertiliser, fuel and other crucial agricultural commodities. A year ago, I listed17 “military attacks on … straits and canals” as a major interruption risk exacerbated by Donald Trump’s antics. The thought that Houthi rebels in Yemen, backed by the Iranian government, might simultaneously resume their attacks on Red Sea shipping keeps me awake at night.

What all this means is a reduction in the key elements of systemic resilience: diversity, redundancy (a system’s spare capacity), modularity (its degree of compartmentalisation), backup (other ways of providing food), asynchronicity (which prevents shocks suddenly compounding) and circuit breakers (mostly in the form of effective regulation). A loss of any one of these properties should be a flashing red light. But the whole dashboard is now lit up.

When a system has lost its resilience, it’s hard to predict just how and when it could go down. The collapse of one corporation? The simultaneous closure of two or more chokepoints? A major IT outage? A severe climate event coinciding with a geopolitical crisis? The next step could be contagious bankruptcy and cascading failure18 across sectors. Then … well, it’s beyond imagination. The chain between seller and buyer – as fundamental to our food supply as the production of food itself – could suddenly snap. Shelves would clear as people panic-bought. Crops would rot in fields, silos or ports. Rebooting a system whose financial architecture has imploded might prove impossible on the timescale required to prevent mass starvation. As complex societies, we’re looking at a potential termination event.

We know what needs to happen: break up the big corporations; bring the system under proper regulatory control; diversify our diets19 and their means of production20; reduce our dependence on a handful of major exporting countries; build strategic food reserves, accessible to people everywhere. But there’s a problem, and it’s not just Trump. Almost all governments are beholden to corporate and financial power. The measures required to avoid catastrophe are those they are least prepared to implement. The chances of a global agreement on this global problem are approximately zero.

The best we can hope for is that braver politicians in our own countries seek to insulate us from the worst impacts. A crucial step is to encourage a shift to a plant-based diet. People struggle to see the relevance, but it’s simple. A plant-based diet requires far fewer resources, including just a quarter of the land21 a standard western diet requires and much less fertiliser and other inputs. Just as we make ourselves more energy-secure by switching from fossil fuels22 to renewables, we make ourselves more food-secure by switching from animals to plants. Don’t take my word for it: it’s a key message in the national security assessment23, which the government sought to withhold24 from public view – probably because it would upset too many powerful interests. Chinese researchers have come to the same conclusion25 about their own country: its food resilience is now dangerously compromised by the rising consumption of animal products.

But policy in the UK is nothing short of moronic. In response to warnings about our food vulnerability, our environment secretary, the former financial lobbyist Emma Reynolds, remarked that she wanted to boost domestic poultry production26. Given that this sector largely depends on imported feed (such as soya from Brazil and maize from the US), her plan would make us more vulnerable. But she proposes scarcely anything else: no strategic reserves, no alternative supply chains, no useful defensive measures of any kind.

Policy here and across most of the world appears to consist of allowing “the market” (namely a few huge global corporations) to decide what happens next. There’s another way of putting it. Our governments are leaving a group of ruthless speculators to play dice with our lives.

We’re now hearing from almost every quarter that Iran posed no threat to us, that Israel is overreacting, that diplomacy was working. These are dangerous misunderstandings. The [Iranian] regime has said, with great consistency and considerable precision, what it believes and what it intends. But our policy makers and news media have failed, over 47 years of news coverage, adequately to explain what this means. This is not a trivial failure.

Our journalistic incentive structure is part of the problem. Editors want sources who speak English fluently and can be quoted on deadline. Scholars who can actually read the primary Persian material are few, often academic and not mediagenic, and not always available. The think-tank analysts who are available have been trained in the rational-actor tradition and translate everything into it. Western foreign policy analysis is so thoroughly marinated in realist IR [International Relations] theory—states pursue interests, interests are material, material interests are negotiable—that ideological frameworks which genuinely mean what they say are systematically discounted. It’s almost a reflex: When a regime says something that sounds irrational, Western analysts translate it into something rational. [Iran’s] eliminationist rhetoric about Israel becomes “a bargaining position.” It isn’t dishonesty so much as trained incapacity, a paradigm so dominant it makes certain things literally difficult to see.

I would go further: literally impossible to see. So, what does the Iranian regime believe and what does it intend? Let’s listen to three voices that are qualified to competently speak of these matters. Berlinski first:

Have a look at the photo above, a billboard recently spotted in Tehran. The red slogan in the center, :ﺗﺎ ﺟﮭﺎن ﺑﯾﺎﺳﺎﯾد , is the Persian translation of the English words, “Until the world finds rest.” The missiles say:

· شهید امام خامنه‌ای — “Martyr Imam Khamenei”

· به یاد دختران میناب — “In memory of the girls of Minab”

· شهید طهرانی مقدم — “Martyr Tehrani Moghaddam”

· شهید حاجی‌زاده — “Martyr Hajizadeh”

· شهید قاسم — “Martyr Qasem”

· جهان بدون ظلم — “A world without oppression/injustice”

· #نه_به_ظلم — “#No to oppression/injustice”

· انتقام — “Revenge”

· درس عبرت — “A lesson.” (Or “an object lesson” or “a warning”)

“UNTIL THE WORLD FINDS REST” are the most important words on the billboard, and they’re doing enormous theological work. They’re ominous enough on the face of it, but far more so in the context of revolutionary Shia eschatology. The world is restless because injustice reigns, and injustice reigns because the enemies of God and righteousness prevail. The world will only find rest when the Mahdi—the “Rightly Guided One”—returns at the end of history, vanquishing evil and ushering in Islamic rule. The billboard is, therefore, an exhortation to struggle in a conflict that is both cosmically necessary and inevitable. The current war, it suggests, belongs to a struggle that ends only with the eschatological consummation.

“A world without oppression/injustice” is another significant phrase. The Persian-Arabic word ظﻠم (zulm) is richer than the English word “oppression.” It denotes the state of the world under illegitimate rule, which it has been, or so Shiites believe, since the battle of Karbala in 680 CE.... The word zulm connotes tyranny, moral disorder, usurpation, things where they don’t belong.... Within this symbolic world, resistance to zulm is a sacred duty. The Islamic Republic uses this word to describe Israel, the United States, hostile Arab states, and internal dissidents. We are embodiments of zulm.

“Down with Israel” has a specific theological significance. For Khomeneists, Israel’s destruction is an eschatological goal, not just a geopolitical one, because Israel’s destruction is the precondition for the Mahdi’s return. Similarly, اﻧﺗﻘﺎم (revenge) refers to the cosmic settling of accounts that will precede the restoration....

For Shia, martyrs aren’t dead. They testify. Their blood speaks. The blood of the girls of Minab speaks, as Husayn’s blood is said to do. Dead children are testimony against ظﻠم, confirming the righteousness of the cause. The juxtaposition of the Minab girls with the “Epstein Island Victim Girls” is quite theologically precise: For Khomeneists, America isn’t merely the great usurper, it’s also the great corruptor, the emblem of sexual licence and moral subversion. The Epstein saga is proof of this. There is an implicit argument here: “They exploit their girls. We avenge ours.” Similarly, naming weapons for martyrs connects the military project directly to the drama of Karbala. The missiles continue the martyrs’ testimony, proving that the shahids didn’t die for nothing....

“Free World,” of course, is a term from the West’s Cold War vocabulary.... In Khomeneist eyes, this term is one of the most successful pieces of Satanic propaganda ever devised: a slave order that calls itself freedom, a corrupting power that calls itself liberation....

The inverted red triangle is a Hamas symbol: It indicates something marked for destruction. The hashtag before #ﻧﮫ_ﺑﮫ_ظﻠم (“#No to oppression/injustice”) is a sardonic allusion to Western social media culture and the digital vocabulary of liberal activism (#BringBackOurGirls, #StandWithUkraine). The implication is that the Great Satan has seduced the world into thinking that by typing a phrase into a phone, it can rectify injustice. Our اﻧﺗﻘﺎم, this says, is rather more concrete.

The authors of the text on the billboard obviously have a sense of their Western audience. They imagine that they’re speaking to us directly, in our own idiom. We’re meant to understand it. But of course, we don’t. No one in the West pays this kind of thing the slightest bit of attention, and this the strangest aspect of our long conflict with the Islamic Republic. For 47 years, it has made its beliefs and its goals unambiguous. What’s more, the behavior of the regime has been consistent with what it claims to believe. But the West just refuses to take any of this seriously. In all of the reporting you’ve seen on this war, have you seen even one article discussing the Mahdi? I haven’t.

It’s as if, during the Cold War, we simply refused to believe that our adversaries were communists, refused to read a word of Marx, and never once considered that Soviet leaders might be serious about building a socioeconomic order based on the common ownership of the means of production, distribution, and exchange. Imagine trying to figure out what Stalin was doing without understanding the concepts of historical materialism, class war, the dictatorship of the proletariat, the vanguard party, or the laws of revolutionary development. Imagine insisting that Bolshevism was just a decorative vocabulary draped over ordinary Russian nationalism, or a kind of theatrical language no one was meant to take literally.

We never talked ourselves into such stupidity....

Khomeinism instructs Iran’s elites, particularly the [Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, IRGC], in the meaning of history. It teaches them that the longed-for redemption of history will emerge, and can only emerge, through struggle, catastrophe, and blood. To ignore all of this isn’t sophistication. It’s just smug illiteracy....

The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps is constitutionally and self-consciously the guardian of the revolution’s ideological purity. Khomenei distrusted the regular Iranian army, Artesh; he created the IRGC in 1979 as an explicitly ideological force.... The IRGC has its own seminaries, publishing houses, and theological training programs. Its officers are expected to be ideologically formed, not just militarily trained....

The IRGC’s paramilitary volunteer force, the Basij, is where the ideological formation reaches its most intense expression. The cult of martyrdom that the Basij cultivates goes back to the Iran-Iraq War, when teenage boys were sent across minefields wearing what were said to be the keys to paradise around their necks. This was one of the most important ways Khomeini transformed the Shia theology of martyrdom into a military doctrine. Shahadat (martyrdom) should be sought, not merely borne, because it guarantees the martyr’s place in paradise and advances the revolutionary project simultaneously. This has direct implications for how the IRGC calculates acceptable losses....

Why would a regime facing existential military pressure not seek de-escalation? The rational-actor model predicts accommodation. But for the ideological core of this regime, the current moment may look less like catastrophe than like confirmation, even fulfillment. The chaos, the fires, the confrontation with “Global Arrogance”—within this eschatology, that’s not a mistake.

The second voice that merits attention belongs to Fatima Abo Alasrar, a non-resident fellow at the Arab Gulf States Institute in Washington, DC. She is the founder of The Ideology Machine, a publication on authoritarian information systems. She specializes in Yemen’s conflict dynamics, the Houthi movement, Iranian-aligned networks, and Gulf security. In a recent post she makes the point that “to understand what is happening now, you have to understand the sequence of decisions that made February 28 almost inevitable, because no single one of them was irrational, and yet taken together they produced an outcome that nobody planned and nobody can control.”

For a decade, Tehran armed, funded, and directed networks that hollowed out sovereign states from the inside, and it did so with a patience and discipline that nobody in Washington fully appreciated because Washington only ever looked at Iran through one lens, which was Israel. The impact on Yemen, on Iraq, on Lebanon, on Syria, the slow strangulation of countries that were trying to build something that was never urgent enough to drive American policy. It was background noise.

And behind all of it, there was a larger architecture that is only now becoming visible. Iran was not operating alone. It was operating within a set of relationships with Russia and China that were collectively working to undermine the American-led order, to weaken NATO, to demonstrate that sovereignty was negotiable and that the rules-based system was a fiction maintained by a power that no longer had the will to enforce it. The bitter irony is that the United States is now doing some of that work itself, fraying its own alliances, alienating its own partners, calling NATO allies cowards for refusing to join a war it started without consulting them. The order is being dismantled from both ends, and the people caught in the middle, the Gulf states, the Yemenis, the Iraqis, the Lebanese, are left trying to navigate a world where neither the architects of destruction nor the supposed guarantors of stability can be relied upon....

The IRGC is not the Islamic Republic. It is something older, deeper, and harder to kill.... The assumption in Washington was that decapitation would trigger collapse, or at minimum that it would create an opening for the protest movement to fill. That assumption misunderstands how the Islamic Republic is structured. This is not a regime that depends on a single leader the way a personalist dictatorship does. It is an institutional system with redundancy built into its design. The Supreme Leader matters, but the IRGC, the Guardian Council, the Assembly of Experts, the Basij, the judiciary, the Friday prayer network, these are independent power centers that can operate without central direction for extended periods. The system was designed, consciously and explicitly, to survive decapitation. It was born in a revolution that understood how its predecessor died, and it made sure it would not die the same way.

And here is where the conversation in the West goes wrong, and dangerously so. There is a narrative, amplified by parts of the Iranian diaspora and embraced by many in Washington, that the Islamic Republic is an alien imposition on a society that is fundamentally secular, Western-oriented, and waiting to be freed. I understand why that narrative is appealing. There are millions of Iranians who want the regime gone, and their courage, particularly in the January protests, was extraordinary. But that narrative flattens eighty-eight million people into a single story, and the parts it leaves out are the parts that will determine whether this war produces a transition or a catastrophe.

The IRGC is not a foreign army. It is a domestic institution that employs, directly and indirectly, millions of Iranians. It runs construction companies that build roads and housing. It operates telecommunications networks. It controls significant portions of Iran’s import-export trade. It manages pension funds and charitable foundations. For a large segment of the Iranian population, the IRGC is the employer, the landlord, the social safety net....

The theory was that if you hit the regime hard enough, the people would do the rest, and the regime has been hit, and the Supreme Leader is dead, and the air defenses are gone, and the regime is still there, because it was never just a man or a building, it was a system, and systems do not fall the way buildings do. I have no illusions about the IRGC, because I watch its smaller version in Yemen every day. The Houthis built theirs in ten years and it is already too deep to pull out by the roots, and the IRGC has had forty. If the system cannot be destroyed from the air, and it cannot, then the question of what comes after requires a coherent answer. It has been asked. It has been answered differently every week....

There is a painful irony that Gulf analysts are noting quietly: the Gulf states had spent years working toward de-escalation with Tehran, including the 2023 Saudi-Iran rapprochement brokered by Beijing, and all of that diplomatic investment has been destroyed not by anything the Gulf did, but by a war launched by their own security partner without their consultation....

[Abbas] Araghchi’s formulation, that the Strait of Hormuz is “open, but closed to our enemies,” is not a casual statement. It is a strategic instrument. It tells the Gulf: your problem is not Iran. Your problem is your association with the United States. Distance yourself and the pain stops. That is the most dangerous proposition in this entire conflict, not because the Gulf will accept it, but because the logic behind it will become more attractive with every day that the American commitment looks fragile and the European commitment looks nonexistent....

Everything I have described converges at the Strait of Hormuz, because the strait is where the military conflict, the energy crisis, and the political sustainability of this war all meet. Before this war, twenty million barrels of oil passed through Hormuz every day. Twenty percent of global LNG. Six hundred billion dollars in annual energy trade. The strait was governed by the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea, which guarantees the right of transit passage through international straits. That legal framework, and the American naval presence that enforced it, was the invisible foundation of the global energy market. It was so stable that the world stopped pricing the risk. The most load-bearing assumptions in any international order are the ones that nobody examines until they fail....

But here is something that other analysts have noted and that is important because it could easily be missed in the coverage of daily strikes and price movements. The strait did not close because of a naval blockade. It closed because of insurance.... Insurance, a mechanism that exists entirely outside the traditional military balance, became the instrument that shut down twenty percent of global oil trade. That is a form of power that is new, and we do not yet have a framework for managing it.

According to Lloyd’s List and the Financial Times, the IRGC has established what it describes as a safe maritime corridor through Iranian territorial waters. Vessels that submit to IRGC vetting, registration, and approval can transit. The reported price is up to two million dollars per vessel, paid in cash, cryptocurrency, or barter. Between March 1 and 15, roughly ninety ships cleared the strait under IRGC clearance. The payments are being made. The commercial precedent is established. The IRGC verifies clearances over VHF radio. Multiple governments, including India, Pakistan, Iraq, Malaysia, and China, are negotiating transit arrangements directly with Tehran.

I want to be precise about what this represents, because it is easy to dismiss as extortion and miss the logic behind it.... Iran is simultaneously attacking ships that transit without permission and charging ships that ask for it. It has effectively turned a waterway governed by international law into a toll road. And the dilemma this creates is one that no capital has solved. Sanctioning the operators who pay the IRGC toll means shutting down the only active oil supply channel through the strait. The extortion is also the lifeline....

The problem is that the American system evaluates threats on short timelines and authoritarians plan on long ones, and that mismatch is how you end up surprised by things that were visible for a decade....

Iran’s theory of victory was never military. It was always political. Tehran cannot defeat the United States Air Force. It can make the war expensive enough, long enough, that American domestic politics does the work. Every day the strait stays closed, gas prices climb. Every day gas prices climb, the political coalition behind the war erodes. Every day the coalition erodes, the probability that Washington will seek an exit increases. And every day that passes without an exit, the IRGC’s toll regime on Hormuz becomes more entrenched, more normalized, and harder to reverse. The question is not who has more firepower. It is whose political tolerance for pain runs out first. This is a contest of endurance disguised as a military conflict, and the outcome will be shaped less by what happens over Iranian airspace than by what happens in American living rooms, European energy markets, and Gulf foreign ministries....

The people absorbing that damage are also the people who still control the guns, the institutions, and the economic networks that make the IRGC indispensable to millions of Iranians. They have everything to lose, and that makes them more dangerous, not less. The Iranian public has not been able to rise at this moment, and until they can, the IRGC will be left standing, weaker and more paranoid but standing.... That is the paradox of successful decapitation in the absence of strategy, and we are not learning from it.

The third voice to which we ought to lend an ear is that of Wajeeh Lion, a Saudi-American, Minneapolis-based human rights activist, journalist, and international geopolitical analyst. In a recent post he explains the working of the military apparatus of Iran.

The military apparatus of the Islamic Republic of Iran—most notably the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) and its paramilitary branches—operates on a foundation vastly different from conventional Western militaries. Instead of relying solely on material superiority or secular nationalism, the Iranian armed forces weave together Twelver Shia theology, pre-Islamic Persian martial traditions, and modern revolutionary symbolism. This unique blend forges an unyielding psychological readiness for battle.

By transforming the kinetic battlefield into a sacred space, Iran effectively immunizes its combatants against the psychological friction of war. Physical death is reframed: it is no longer seen as a tragic loss, but as a victorious, eschatological transition to a divine state.

At the heart of this mobilization is the seamless blending of Islamic martyrdom culture with ancient Persian heroic traditions. Through orchestrated communal prayers, rhythmic eulogies, and grueling physical rituals, the Iranian state bridges the gap between the seventh century and today’s geopolitical conflicts. Martyrdom (Shahadat) becomes a proactive, strategic tool that drives unit cohesion and ideological loyalty, presenting a military force where religious purpose and operational doctrine are indistinguishable.

To understand the psychological endurance of Iranian forces, one must look to the “Karbala paradigm,” the absolute epicenter of Shia political and military identity. This paradigm is anchored in the events of 680 CE, when Imam Husayn (the grandson of the Prophet Muhammad) and seventy-two companions were surrounded and slaughtered by the superior forces of the Umayyad Caliph Yazid in the desert of Karbala. Denied water and food for days, Husayn refused to pledge allegiance to a tyrant. On the tenth day of the month of Muharram, known as Ashura, he and his followers were killed in a brutal final stand.

In the Iranian strategic consciousness, Karbala is not a static historical tragedy; it is an active, ongoing reality. During the 1979 Islamic Revolution, figures like Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini and sociologist Ali Shariati weaponized this memory. Shariati redefined martyrdom from a passive tragedy into an active “involvement”—a conscious choice and a divine medal of honor.

During the devastating Iran-Iraq War (1980–1988), dubbed the “Sacred Defense,” this paradigm was mobilized on a massive scale. Ayatollah Khomeini framed the conflict as a cosmic reenactment of Karbala. Iraqi President Saddam Hussein was cast as the modern-day Yazid, while young Iranian volunteers were positioned as the righteous followers of Imam Husayn. Frontline trenches were officially called “Husayn’s front,” bullets were “ambassadors of monotheism,” and state propaganda depicted ancient martyrs carrying fallen soldiers to paradise. This visual and ideological saturation completely dissolved the human fear of death....

While Shia theology provides the spiritual software, Iran’s physical and moral hardware is deeply rooted in ancient Persian martial traditions. The institution of the Zurkhaneh (“House of Strength”) and the practice of Varzesh-e Bastani (Ancient Sport) are heavily integrated into the IRGC’s physical education and combat training programs.... The physical conditioning uses equipment deliberately designed to mimic ancient warfare. Athletes swing the Mil, massive, club-like wooden weights that build immense upper body strength, symbolizing the devastating striking power of the ancient Persian heavy cavalry mace. They also use the Kabada, a heavy iron chain connecting a rigid metal bow structure; rattling and shifting this overhead simulates the extreme tension required to draw a war bow. To build the strength needed to fend off battlefield blows, athletes lie in a supine position and press the Sang—enormous wooden panels weighing up to 80 kilograms that act as a surrogate for heavy shields.

These exercises are dictated by the rhythm of a master (morshed) who beats a drum and chants epic poetry from Ferdowsi’s Shahnameh, intertwined with religious verses praising Imam Ali. This creates a hypnotic, moving meditation. The paramount virtue cultivated here is Javanmardi (chivalry or spiritual nobility). A true champion (pahlevan) must possess crushing physical strength to fight enemies, alongside moral fortitude to defend the weak and support the community. By immersing soldiers in this environment, the Iranian military psychologically armors them with a dual legacy: they are simultaneously mythological Persian warriors and righteous Shia soldiers.

The translation of these rituals into effective military statecraft is managed by the highly sophisticated command structure of the IRGC. Founded in 1979 to protect the revolution, the IRGC operates parallel to, but completely separate from, the conventional Iranian army (the Artesh), ensuring ideological purity.

The IRGC commands an estimated 190,000 active personnel distributed across five highly specialized branches. The Ground Forces, comprising roughly 150,000 active troops, serve as the primary land army responsible for territorial defense and internal security. The Aerospace Force, with about 15,000 personnel, controls Iran’s strategic arsenal of ballistic missiles, UAVs, and air defense systems. In the Persian Gulf and the Strait of Hormuz, the Navy (NEDSA) utilizes its 20,000 personnel (including Marines) to execute asymmetric, fast-attack warfare. Domestically, the Basij paramilitary force maintains 40,000 active members—with hundreds of thousands more mobilizable—to manage internal security, morality policing, and wartime mobilization. Finally, the elite Quds Force, consisting of 2,000 to 5,000 operatives, handles extraterritorial unconventional warfare, proxy training, and foreign intelligence.

What makes the IRGC distinctly effective is its unique “by-pass” oversight mechanism. IRGC commanders bypass the standard military chain of command and report directly to the Supreme Leader. Furthermore, an extensive network of approximately 2,000 Clerical Commissars is embedded within every unit and base. Operating under the Supreme Leader’s direct supervision, these commissars ensure that the recitation of prayers, the organization of mourning gatherings, and the Karbala paradigm remain the primary drivers of all tactical decision-making.

Because the Iranian state is fundamentally driven by the IRGC’s revolutionary ambitions, its international behavior relies heavily on theological mechanisms to manage escalation and confuse adversaries.... This doctrinal flexibility allows the IRGC to balance the uncompromising rhetoric of martyrdom with highly calculated asymmetric deterrence. The goal is not necessarily to win a conventional war against a technologically superior adversary, but to deter aggression by presenting the threat of a maximum retaliatory price. A force immunized against the fear of death, physically hardened by ancient traditions, and prepared to inflict catastrophic damage via proxy networks cannot be easily coerced by the mere threat of kinetic force.

The exhaustive integration of Shia mourning rituals, liturgical recitation, and ancient Persian athletic traditions yields a profound strategic advantage for Iran. By weaponizing historical grief, the state continuously replenishes its ideological reserves. By incorporating ancient athletic rituals, it ensures that soldiers’ physical conditioning perfectly mirrors their ideological conditioning. And by mapping contemporary adversaries onto the ancient archetypes of Karbala, the IRGC insulates its proxy wars from domestic fatigue.

The battle readiness and strategic endurance of the Iranian Shia soldier cannot be quantified simply by counting ballistic missiles or troop numbers. To understand or deter the military maneuvers of the Islamic Republic, one must first understand the psychological and theological engine that drives it: the recitation of the Ziyarat Ashura, the cadence of the eulogist, the legacy of Karbala, and the chivalric ethos of the Zurkhaneh.

Since this article went online, Waajeh Lion has published a string of posts that provide more valuable insights. Together with Malcolm Nance and Jacob Kaarsbo he publishes a highly informative—and I dare say entertaining— daily US-Iran war cast, which is now also available as a podcast.

Robert Pape: Let’s talk about the moral issue for a moment and really focus on that. I agree that this [the Iranian regime] is a morally awful regime. I am not here to defend this regime. They just butchered something like 30,000 of their civilians, piled up the bodies. But just think about this for a moment. When we say that we are in a morally just war, we need to realize that just because this is an evil opponent, they may with their capability do more evil things—that what they’ve done so far is not the limit of their evil. It may be just the beginning of their evil. You see, when we attack an evil enemy, we need to recognize we may be creating opportunities for that enemy to hurt us and do more evil in the world, which is what I think is happening. I have a lot of conversations with people saying “I’m not a Trump supporter but isn’t this a moral war?” That “this a bad enemy and we should go hurt him.” And my point to them is, what we have done was such a bad approach that there is now more evil in the world than there was. And that’s the only point I want to make on the moral front here.

About a month ago, Pape started a substack titled “Escalation Trap.” In a post dated March 19 he outlines what the term means:

The term escalation trap is now spreading. That is not an accident. A new way of understanding this war is taking hold.

The Core Logic

The escalation trap is not simply that wars get bigger. It is that efforts to control a conflict can make it harder to control.

Step 1: Limited force to achieve a defined objective.

Step 2: The opponent adapts through horizontal escalation—expanding the battlefield and raising costs.

Step 3: Each move to regain control creates pressure for further escalation.

The result is not stability. It is a widening conflict with more actors, more geography, and higher stakes. That is the trap. Each step is strategically rational. And yet the outcome is a war that becomes harder to contain.

This is why focusing only on what can be destroyed misses the point. The real issue is how each action reshapes what comes next.

In his next post of March 20, Pape elaborates:

Right now, most people think they are watching how future escalation will unfold. They are not. They are watching the last phase of one kind of war—just before it becomes another. The next phase will not just be more intense. It will be fundamentally different. What is changing is not the level of violence. It is the nature of harm.

Most observers still believe escalation is a matter of degree. More strikes. More retaliation. More pressure. This assumes the war is simply intensifying along a familiar path. It is not. Escalation is not linear. It is structural—it crosses thresholds. What appears as gradual escalation is often a transition between fundamentally different phases of conflict. Leaders believe they are calibrating force. In reality, they are moving the war across thresholds that change what strategies are available—and the level of costs they will pay. Once those thresholds are crossed, the logic of the war changes with them.

The escalation trap is not just that wars expand. It is that efforts to control the conflict create pressures that make major escalation across thresholds more likely. We saw this in the opening of the Iran war. A U.S.–Israeli leadership strike intended to produce a quick and decisive victory did not topple the regime. Instead, it triggered a response the attackers did not anticipate. Iran did not simply retaliate—it adapted, expanding the battlefield through horizontal escalation that raised costs across shipping, regional partners, and critical infrastructure. Each move by the stronger side to “win” quickly created new incentives for the weaker side to widen and deepen the conflict. The search for control produced … the loss of control.

Not all escalation is the same. Some escalation increases intensity. This is change of degree. Other escalation changes the nature of the war itself. This is change across thresholds that change the persistence and cumulative level of costs. We are now shifting from [temporary] disruption to [lasting] damage.

The difference between disruption and damage is not abstract. In the current phase [March 20], Iran can disrupt oil markets by threatening shipping in the Strait of Hormuz. Tankers reroute. Insurance premiums spike. Flows slow. But these effects are reversible.

Damage works differently. It removes physical capacity. If oil infrastructure is directly attacked—export terminals, offshore loading platforms, refineries—the effects are fundamentally different. Facilities like Kharg Island, which handles the majority of Iran’s oil exports, are complex, integrated systems of pipelines, storage tanks, and loading terminals. They cannot be quickly replaced.

Disruption delays flows.... Sustained damage creates lasting economic shock—exactly the time horizon of months associated with recession-level effects that economists are discussing today. This is how a regional war becomes an historic global economic crisis.

The United States and its partners have incentives to keep the conflict at the level of disruption.... For Tehran, the stakes are existential. Survival, not stability, is the objective. When survival is at stake, the rational strategy is not calibrated restraint so as to retain capacity to benefit later. It is to impose costs on the opponent that are deep, prolonged, and difficult to reverse.

In a more recent post dated March 25, Pape explains why “everyone is asking the wrong question about this war.”

The problem is not Trump’s rhetoric. It is that we are watching the wrong signals.

Trump’s words are not confusing. They are doing exactly what presidential rhetoric is designed to do: manage multiple audiences at once—domestic voters, financial markets, allies, and adversaries. Ambiguity is not a flaw. It is the strategy. The mistake is treating rhetoric as a guide to action rather than as a tool of political management.

If you want to understand where this war is going, ignore what is said. Watch what moves.

In late 2025, the administration’s rhetoric toward Venezuela oscillated sharply. At times, Trump emphasized restraint and the possibility of negotiated outcomes. At other moments, he invoked regime change and warned of decisive action. Media coverage followed every shift, parsing tone as if it revealed intent.

But beneath the rhetoric, a different signal was emerging. Beginning in September, U.S. forces were quietly repositioned across the Caribbean. Within weeks, the buildup expanded to roughly 12,000–15,000 personnel, an aircraft carrier strike group, multiple destroyers, and forward basing across key regional nodes. Logistics chains were activated. Air and naval assets were synchronized.

The rhetoric suggested uncertainty. The deployments revealed direction.

The same structure is now visible in the current crisis with Iran.... The rhetoric remains ambiguous. The deployments do not. And that is the signal analysts keep missing.

Rhetoric fluctuates, media reacts, and outcomes follow deployments. This is a recurring feature of crisis behavior. The more attention we pay to rhetoric, the more we risk missing commitment. The United States is not escalating because of what Trump says. It is escalating because of what it is building.

The real signal is whether the physical infrastructure of escalation—forces, logistics, command—continues to expand. That is what locks in pathways. That is what narrows choices. That is what turns possibility into probability. The most important question is no longer what Trump says next. It is whether the build-up we are now seeing continues. Because if it does, the trajectory of this war is no longer uncertain. It is accelerating.

Now let’s get back to Hayes’ March-18 interview with Pape (edited for clarity and brevity). The ratchet metaphor is introduced to describe the non-linearly of conflict escalation.

Robert Pape: When the smart bombs hit, they’re tactically successful yet strategically ineffective but they do more: they change the politics inside the target. They’re a game changer. A threshold from game theory has been crossed, which allows for dramatically worse outcomes.

Your point, Chris, about the nonlinear ratcheting effect of the escalation is right. And that’s why stage one [the smart bombs hitting] is a dangerous trap. It’s a ratchet up. Stage two is dangerous. That’s a bigger ratchet up. We’re now on the cusp of stage three, which may be the biggest ratchet of all with the ground force options. This is something that we really need to understand. People think, well, sure, we tried this, it didn’t work. We’ll just keep going up the escalation ladder. It’s a ratchet up. And this is changing the game against us at every ratchet.

We’re about to cross that next ratchet—possibly. If we do a ground operation, this is going to have two effects on politics. Number one, there’s a good chance we’re going to see a lot of our forces killed. Maybe they’ll win the battle, but it’ll be more like Saving Private Ryan. And that is going to create a lot of sympathy inside of the body politic here, for those dead Americans who died for us. It’s also then going to create politics inside of Iran where they’re start to become fearful if we’re going to do what we call a limited ground operation. They’re not going to believe it’s limited. If we start to go on the ground and take even just Kharg Island, they’re not going to believe it’s going to stay at Kharg Island. Why would it? We’ve said regime change.

You’re going to get resistance here, organized maybe even independently of the regime. You’re going to end up likely producing resistance, not on day one but over time, and that’s my big work on terrorism, Chris, that we haven’t talked about. After 9/11 I compiled the first database on all suicide attacks around the world, and I published two books on it. one is Dying to Win. And it shows that 95% of all suicide attacks are triggered by ground forces, foreign ground forces, military presence. That is there now, but this [a military presence] will increase it 20 times.

[At the time] that led me to predict if we invade or occupy Iraq, this will touch off the largest suicide terrorist campaign of modern times, which is what happened. I predicted it before it happened, and that is how my name became well known inside of the US government. If we start on the ground here [in Iran], we’re really going to set off a hornets’ nest. That hornets’ nest in Iraq went on for 15 years. That is how we got ISIS. Which did not exist until we produced it like Frankenstein’s monster.

Israel has long argued that a good outcome here would be to cause a failed state in Iran, to break the Iran regime. But let’s think about what that means right now. Iran has a thousand pounds of 60% enriched uranium. It has 10,000 pounds of 5% and 20% enriched uranium. If you create a failed state in Iran, this is a country now with those thousands of pounds of enriched uranium which could go anywhere. Maybe you’ll even find half of it. But there’s a real danger that you’ll get a radiological bomb that’ll blow up in Tel Aviv. It’s basically a version of the loose nukes problem we had in Russia, but now it’s with Iran. That enriched uranium will be worth 10 times the value of gold, and people will be willing to pay for it. So, how are you going to get a radiological bomb in in Tel Aviv to go off? This is the pathway I’m most worried about. So, I completely disagree [with Israel’s argument], and I realize I’m going up against the prime minister of a country, but I completely disagree. I believe that their strategy is actually going to undermine Israel’s security. imagine ISIS with 60% enriched uranium. I mean, my goodness gracious, just think about the possibilities here.

Remember the ripple effect of us invading Iraq, how we got the Syrian civil war was because we invaded Iraq. So, now what we’re doing is we’re ignoring all of these dominoes again. And this is how you could really wreck that world’s oil for a long time to come.

Why Iran Wants JD Vance: The Hidden Logic of the “Interlocutor Strategy”

As of now this is Robert Pape’s latest post written up here by NotebookLM:

In the cold mathematics of international relations, the selection of a diplomatic channel is rarely a matter of personal affinity. Iran’s signaled preference for JD Vance as a primary interlocutor—strikingly bypassing established transactional figures like Jared Kushner or hardline operatives like Steve Witkoff—has been dismissed by some as a mere curiosity. To the seasoned strategist, however, this is a masterclass in political warfare. Tehran is not looking for a “deal” in the conventional sense. It is engaging in a sophisticated effort to weaponize American domestic friction to achieve what its missiles and proxies cannot: the neutralization of U.S. power from within. This is the “Interlocutor Strategy”—a calculated move to exploit internal divisions because Iran understands that in an age of asymmetry, the decisive battlefield is not a desert in the Middle East, but the political landscape of the stronger power.

The Calculus of Asymmetry: When Weakness Mandates Indirect Warfare

The fundamental driver of Iranian strategy is a stark recognition of power asymmetry. By every conventional metric—kinetic capability, economic depth, and alliance architecture—the United States remains the world’s preeminent superpower. In a direct, symmetrical clash of arms, the Islamic Republic faces certain destruction. This reality necessitates an indirect approach. When a weaker state cannot match a stronger adversary on the battlefield, it must seek to shape the environment in which that adversary operates. Strategy is pushed out of the physical domain and into the political one, where the goal is to raise costs, stretch timelines, and paralyze the opponent’s decision-making process. The logic is as inescapable as it is effective:

Power asymmetry → indirect strategy → political warfare

For a weaker state, this shift is not an elective tactic; it is the only viable path to survival and success.

The Fragility of Might: Why Firepower Bows to Political Will

History is littered with the remains of superior militaries that were defeated not by enemy fire, but by the collapse of their own domestic cohesion. For a global power, internal division acts as a structural constraint on military effectiveness. While a unified state can project force with decisive clarity, a divided one becomes slow, reactive, and ultimately constrained. The most effective way to weaken a stronger state is not to defeat its army. It is to divide its politics. For Tehran, the objective is to ensure that Washington can never reach the level of internal consensus required to sustain a high-intensity conflict. By targeting the “political will” of the United States, Iran seeks to render American firepower strategically irrelevant.

The Selection of a Position: Why Personalities Give Way to Policy Levers

Iran’s preference for JD Vance is a strategic selection of a position, not a person. To understand why Vance is more valuable to Tehran than a “dealmaker” like Jared Kushner, one must look at the underlying philosophies of power. A transactional figure like Kushner operates on the premise of leverage; the threat of force remains a primary currency in the negotiation. Conversely, Vance represents a burgeoning “restrainer” faction within the American system—one deeply skeptical of military escalation and foreign entanglements. By signaling a preference for Vance, Iran is attempting to empower a specific policy lever that devalues the threat of American force itself. Tehran is not choosing a negotiator; it is choosing a faction that prioritizes withdrawal over engagement, providing the Islamic Republic with the strategic breathing room it desperately requires.

The Legitimacy Loop: Weaponizing Domestic Friction as Strategic Leverage

The “Interlocutor Strategy” functions as a structural tool to turn American internal disagreements into external leverage. By elevating a specific negotiator associated with restraint, an adversary effectively legitimizes that faction’s standing within the U.S. policy ecosystem. This “Legitimacy Loop” follows a deliberate, escalatory sequence:

Select interlocutor → legitimize faction → increase internal pressure → constrain escalation

This process creates a pressure-cooker environment. By signaling that peace is only possible through one specific domestic channel, Iran increases the political weight of the restrainers in the U.S. decision-making process. This forces the administration into a reactive posture, where the fear of domestic political blowback begins to dictate the limits of foreign policy.

The “Whose Interests?” Dilemma: Exploiting the Fissures of Alliance

A critical component of this strategy involves widening the friction between U.S. and Israeli strategic interests. Tehran capitalizes on a growing narrative within the American elite that certain regional conflicts serve external priorities more directly than national ones. This wedge is no longer theoretical; it is manifesting in real-time dissent. The resignation of figures like Joe Kent, whose public skepticism intensified following engagement with Vance, serves as a primary example of how the Interlocutor Strategy bears fruit. When significant portions of the U.S. policy community begin to question whether a conflict is “misaligned with core U.S. interests,” the state’s ability to act cohesively evaporates. The debate shifts from the tactical— how to win —to the existential— why are we there?

The Ghost of Paris: Learning from the Vietnam Precedent

This strategy finds its historical anchor in the 1968–1973 Paris Peace Talks. During this protracted period, North Vietnam used the veneer of “reasonableness” and aligned its messaging with the American anti-war movement to fracture U.S. political cohesion. Hanoi did not need to defeat the U.S. Army to achieve its revolutionary goals. Instead, it used the negotiations to constrain Washington’s ability to sustain the war effort, ultimately leading to an ignominious strategic defeat for the United States. The lesson for the modern era is clear: Weak states survive and succeed not by matching the strength of the superpower, but by outlasting its internal unity.

The Ultimate Front: The Battlefield Within

The “Interlocutor Strategy” is a reminder that in the high-stakes theater of modern geopolitics, the most decisive front is often located within the stronger state. Iran’s focus on specific U.S. political figures is a clear signal: they recognize that American political cohesion—not the number of carrier strike groups in the Persian Gulf—is the U.S. military’s true “center of gravity.” Ultimately, the resolution of current tensions will depend less on the technological superiority of American hardware and more on the integrity of its internal purpose. This invites a sobering question for the American public and its leaders: Can a superpower remain effective on the global stage if it allows its adversaries to select its negotiators and define its domestic debates?

The Nitrogen Trap: Why the Global Food Supply Is Being Held Hostage by Three “Locks”

1. Introduction: The Unseen War of Molecules

While the world’s attention is captured by the kinetic movement of missiles and military maneuvers, a silent blockade is currently threatening human survival. The “Nitrogen Trap” has snapped shut, secured by three deliberate geopolitical locks timed to the same biological calendar. This is not a traditional war of territory, but a war of molecules. We are witnessing a strategic prioritization of energy revenue over global caloric stability. As the global planting window begins to close, the nitrogen required to sustain the world’s population is being systematically prevented from reaching the soil. The food the world will consume next year is currently being decided by a logistical and political stranglehold on the building blocks of life.

2. Lock One: The Strait of Hormuz as a Geopolitical Filter

The first lock is located at the Strait of Hormuz, where the IRGC has transformed a vital maritime passage into a permissioned corridor. This is no longer a simple funnel for global trade; it is a filter. While oil tankers from friendly nations are permitted to transit for a fee of $2 million yuan, fertilizer vessels are being denied entry at any price.

Key Data:

● The Zero-Transit Period: There have been zero approved fertilizer transits through the strait in the last 24 days.

● Strategic Market Share: The Gulf region supplies 49% of the world’s exported urea and approximately 30% of traded ammonia. This blockade creates a stark distinction in global priorities. The supply is not merely delayed; it is being actively denied to ensure the gatekeeper’s revenue remains decoupled from the world’s survival needs. “The gate opens for molecules that fund the gatekeeper. It stays closed for molecules that feed the planet.”

3. Lock Two: Russia’s Strategic “Disease and Cure” Maneuver

The second lock is a tactical export decree from Russia, the world’s largest exporter of ammonium nitrate (AN). Moscow has halted all AN exports until after April 21, officially citing “domestic priority.” However, the strategic effect is pure leverage. By capitalizing on the oil price spikes created by its ally’s war in the Middle East, Russia earns windfall revenue while simultaneously removing 3 to 4 million tons of fertilizer from global markets at the exact moment the Northern Hemisphere requires it for peak planting. It is a calculated move to dominate both the energy and agricultural sectors: providing the disease and the cure, again, from the same address.

4. Lock Three: China’s Long-Term Export Withdrawal

The third and final lock is China’s comprehensive trade ban, which effectively seals the trap. Beijing has prohibited the export of nitrogen-potassium blends and phosphate fertilizers through August 2026. As the world’s largest phosphate producer and a major nitrogen supplier, China’s withdrawal removes the last alternative source capable of mitigating the losses from the Strait of Hormuz and Russia. This is not a temporary market fluctuation but a multi-year exit from the global stage, ensuring that the shortfall in nitrogen molecules cannot be corrected by shifting trade routes.

5. Biology Does Not Negotiate

While geopolitics can be fluid, the biological calendar is rigid. Timing is the most critical factor in food production; cellular processes do not wait for policy reversals, market corrections, or diplomatic breakthroughs. If a plant does not receive nitrogen during its specific growth window, the yield loss is locked in by the DNA of the seed.

Global Biological Window Status:

● US Corn Belt (Closing Mid-April): Nitrogen is required during the V6 to VT growth stages; missing this window permanently reduces kernel set.

● European Union (Active Now): Critical top-dressing for small grains is currently underway; missed applications will result in a grain fill collapse.

● India (Beginning May): Kharif preparation requires immediate supply for the monsoon planting cycle.

● Bangladesh (Active Now): Boro rice transplanting is occurring this week; failure to apply nitrogen results in a 20% to 40% yield drop in these low-input systems. Once these windows close, no subsequent application or price increase can recover what was lost. These are not economic models; they are hard physical limits. “The damage is written into the biology of the seed.”

6. The Geography of Hunger

The impact of the Nitrogen Trap will not be felt equally. For the developed West, the crisis will manifest as inflation and lower agricultural profits. For subsistence regions, the impact is existential.

Projected Impacts:

● Global Drag: A 5% to 10% global drag on yields is now inevitable.

● High-Risk Zones: The shortfall will be felt most acutely in Bangladesh, Sub-Saharan Africa, and South Asia, where buffers are thinnest.

● Historical Context: In 2021, Sri Lanka’s ban on synthetic fertilizer led to a 40% collapse in rice yields and the subsequent fall of the government. In 2008, simultaneous spikes in fertilizer and oil prices triggered food riots across 30 countries. In the current landscape, a 20% yield shortfall in these regions does not represent a financial loss—it represents hunger and inevitable civil unrest.

7. Conclusion: The Clock Stays Ticking

The convergence of a military blockade in Hormuz, Russia’s tactical withholding, and China’s long-term withdrawal has created a perfect storm. The “molecules” already know what the markets will soon discover. The USDA Prospective Plantings report (March 31) and the FAO Food Price Index (April 3) will provide the first quantitative markers of this crisis. These reports will reflect the reality that the nitrogen did not arrive in time for the biological windows of the Northern Hemisphere. The global community must now confront a chilling reality: a war fought with missiles is rapidly becoming a famine fought with molecules. We must ask whether political conflicts can ever be reconciled with the non-negotiable requirements of the soil before the biological calendar runs out.

Beyond the Blockade: 4 Surprising Truths About the New Monetary Order in the Strait of Hormuz

Geography is no longer destiny in the Strait of Hormuz; ideology is. The traditional definition of this 21-mile waterway as a “maritime chokepoint” is becoming obsolete in real-time. The Strait has evolved into a high-stakes “guest list” at the world’s most exclusive and dangerous club. Currently, the reality on the water is jarring: while four hundred ships sit idle in the surrounding waters, only three vessels were permitted to transit in a recent 24-hour window. This is no longer a blockade in the conventional sense. It is a selective “sorting mechanism” where passage is determined by political alignment rather than maritime right. The IRGC is effectively selecting the future of global trade one hull at a time.

1. The “Guest List” is Redrawing the Global Map

The “Hormuz Sorting Mechanism” is bifurcating the globe with surgical precision. Access to the Strait is now a reward for geopolitical neutrality or explicit alignment with Iranian interests, replacing the century-old doctrine of “freedom of navigation” with a requirement for “political loyalty.” The nations currently granted passage reflect a new eastern-tilting coalition. China leads the pack, with its vessels broadcasting “CHINA CREW” on AIS to ensure safe passage. India follows, with the LPG tankers Shivalik and Nanda Devi recently cleared and escorted through the corridor. Other “friendly” nations include Pakistan—specifically Aframax tankers bound for Karachi—along with Turkey, Malaysia, Iraq, and Bangladesh. Even Sri Lanka was recently designated a “friendly nation” by the Iranian ambassador in Colombo, securing its spot on the list. Conversely, the gate remains firmly shut for the United States, Israel, Japan, and South Korea. This isn’t just a temporary delay; it is a fundamental reordering of who is allowed to participate in the global energy trade. “The gate is not for sale to everyone. It is for sale to a specific coalition: the nations that did not join the war, or that Iran calculates it can pull closer by offering what the strait controls.”

2. The $2 Million Yuan Toll: Weaponizing the Payment Rail

The IRGC has introduced a financial barrier that is as significant as the physical one, effectively weaponizing the payment rail. Every vessel permitted to cross the Strait is charged a $2 million toll per crossing. Crucially, this fee is denominated exclusively in Chinese Yuan. By forcing ships to settle transit fees in yuan, the IRGC is creating a live-fire environment where the U.S. dollar is irrelevant to the world’s most critical energy corridor. This is a direct, calculated strike against the “petrodollar architecture.” For those on the “wrong” side of the list, the exclusion is absolute. The source is clear: “No toll will buy entry.” Any vessel with the following is barred regardless of payment:

● U.S. or Israeli beneficial ownership

● U.S. or Israeli insurance

● U.S. or Israeli crew members

3. The “Proof of Concept” Outlasts the Conflict

The U.S. military response has focused on the physical infrastructure of the gate. CENTCOM has engaged in the kinetic degradation of IRGC coastal assets, striking over 50 missile sites to prevent the enforcement of the blockade. According to the Wall Street Journal, U.S. planners are also weighing contingency operations against Kharg Island. The goal is to sever the revenue streams that fund the gate, operating under the logic that if the IRGC cannot enforce the corridor, the “sorting mechanism” collapses. However, from a macro-strategic perspective, the experiment has already succeeded. The IRGC has successfully demonstrated that global energy trade can be settled in yuan through a non-Western chokepoint during an active shooting war. This “yuan payment rail built under fire” provides a permanent template for future trade. Even if the physical “toll booth” is demolished tomorrow, the precedent lives on in the transaction records of every tanker that paid the toll to pass. “The IRGC may lose the strait. It will not lose the demonstration.”

4. China’s “No-Shot” Victory

Beijing is the primary beneficiary of this chaos, securing a strategic victory without deploying a single soldier. While Washington spends billions on kinetic interventions, China’s tankers pass freely, and its refineries process the crude. There is a profound, systemic irony in the current escalation. The United States is funding and fighting a war that is inadvertently testing and refining the very payment infrastructure that China is positioned to inherit. The volatility of the conflict is the very engine driving nations toward the yuan-denominated alternative. As the category of nations paying in yuan grows and the category of those waiting outside shrinks, the distance between the two is measured in a currency Washington no longer controls.

Conclusion: The Audition for What Comes Next

The Strait of Hormuz has moved beyond its role as a geographical chokepoint. It has become an audition for a new monetary order, sorting the world’s nations into those who can transact in the new system and those who are left in the cold. The “Hormuz Sorting Mechanism” has proven that a viable, hardened alternative to dollar-denominated trade exists and can function under extreme pressure. The transaction records of the Shivalik and the Karachi-bound Aframaxes are more than just logs; they are the blueprints for a post-dollar era. Can the global energy trade ever truly return to a dollar-only system, now that the “Hormuz Sorting Mechanism” has proven to the world’s emerging powers that a functional alternative is already here?

The Pentagon’s New Brain: 4 Surprising Truths About the Maven AI Integration

The dust of the Iran war has settled on a new reality for the American war machine. History will remember this conflict as the “GPS moment” of the 21st century—the point where a lethal, experimental technology became an irreversible standard. Just as the 1991 Gulf War proved that satellite navigation was the future of precision, the recent escalation has done the same for Artificial Intelligence. On March 9, Deputy Secretary of Defense Steve Feinberg signed a directive that effectively ended the era of “test-bed” AI. He officially designated Palantir’s “Maven Smart System” as a permanent “program of record,” centralizing the US military’s warfighting intelligence into a single, commercial platform. This isn’t a software patch; it is a fundamental reconfiguration of the kill chain. The Pentagon has moved beyond simply using AI to assist humans; it has built a new brain to lead them.

1. Speed at an Impossible Scale

During “Operation Epic Fury,” the Maven system transformed the chaotic data of a multi-front conflict into a streamlined menu of targets. By ingesting a relentless firehose of data from satellites, drones, radars, and ground sensors, Maven generated real-time “weapons-targeting heat maps” across the Middle East. The sheer velocity of this system has rendered traditional human-centric analysis obsolete. The statistics are staggering: Maven assisted in identifying and engaging over 1,000 targets within the first few hours of the operation. Over the subsequent three weeks, it supported thousands of strikes, collapsing a targeting cycle that previously took hours of human deliberation into a matter of seconds. “What once took hours... now happens while you watch.” — Cameron Stanley, Pentagon Official

2. The Consolidation of the “Single Brain”

The Pentagon is no longer experimenting with Maven; it is codifying it as the singular architecture of American power. Feinberg’s memo orders the system integrated across all branches of the US armed forces by September. This move is nothing short of “revolutionary,” according to the Pentagon’s chief digital and AI officer, as it collapses eight or nine disjointed legacy systems into one operational workflow. The financial and structural gravity of this shift is immense. With a contract ceiling of $1.3 billion—piled on top of a $10 billion Army deal—Palantir has secured its place at the heart of the defense establishment. The company’s $360 billion market capitalization reflects its new status as the proprietor of the “Single Brain” that governs all domains: air, land, sea, space, and cyber. For the first time, a single commercial platform sits at the center of every kill chain in the United States military.

3. The “Supply-Chain Risk” Paradox

A profound structural tension now exists between the Pentagon and the very technology it has deemed essential. The AI model powering Maven’s analytical core is Claude, created by Anthropic. This has created a “supply-chain risk” because Anthropic refused to remove restrictions on two specific uses: mass domestic surveillance and fully autonomous lethal weapons systems. While Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth initially ordered a phase-out of Anthropic’s tools, the Pentagon quickly issued a national security waiver, admitting the system is too critical and too embedded to remove during active war. The military’s position is driven by an “all-domain” necessity—the belief that to deter and dominate modern adversaries, the US must have a unified, AI-driven command structure that operates at machine speed. To the Pentagon, the Maven system is the only tool capable of managing the complexity of modern warfare, making any ethical or technical restriction from a vendor a secondary concern to operational survival. Conversely, the developer’s position is rooted in the technical reality of the model’s limitations. Anthropic maintains that the technology is fundamentally not designed for the high-stakes environment of autonomous lethality, where a single algorithmic “hallucination” can result in catastrophic unintended consequences. These two positions—the military’s demand for total dominance and the creator’s warning of technical unreliability—are structurally incompatible.

4. The Warning from Within

The most harrowing critiques of this integration are not coming from pacifists, but from the architects of the systems themselves. Dario Amodei, CEO of Anthropic, has been blunt, stating that AI models are “simply not reliable enough to power fully autonomous weapons.” These are the words of the man whose software is currently being fast-tracked into the center of the US military’s decision-making apparatus. Then there are the builders—those who saw the machine’s guts and fled. In February, a group of former insiders broke their silence to warn that the guardrails intended to keep these systems under control are failing. “The systems we helped build have evolved beyond the guardrails we understood to be in place.” — Thirteen former Palantir employees

A System That Makes Decisions

The comparison to GPS is ultimately a warning. While GPS tells a pilot where they are, Maven tells a commander what to kill. It does not merely provide data; it sifts through the noise of the battlefield to make targeting decisions. The Pentagon has now made this AI the cornerstone of its global strategy, even as the creators of the technology insist it is not ready for the responsibility. The military has bet the future of national security on a system its own developers call unreliable. One of these positions will break.

Why the Mountain Always Wins: The Unstoppable Logic of Iran’s Rail-Based Missile Strategy

1. Introduction: The Paradox of the Persistent Launch

How does a military facility endure weeks of high-intensity precision strikes from the world’s most advanced air forces and continue to project power? Since February 28, the Yazd Imam Hussein complex has been the focal point of a relentless kinetic campaign. With recorded strikes on March 1, March 6, March 17, and even earlier today, the facility’s surface should be a graveyard of twisted rebar and scorched earth. To a satellite observer, the craters suggest a neutralized threat. Yet, the missiles continue to emerge. The answer to this strategic paradox is that the Yazd complex is not a bunker in the traditional sense; it is a “weapons factory on wheels.” Carved into the heart of a granite massif, the site operates as a subterranean subway system for ballistic missiles. While the world watches the fire and fury at the portals, the real war is being won hundreds of meters below the surface, where a mobile infrastructure renders the most sophisticated aerial ordnance irrelevant.

2. The 460-Meter Dead Zone: Where Physics Defeats Ordnance

In the ledger of modern siege warfare, the primary tool of the aggressor is the “bunker-buster.” The apex of this technology is the GBU-57 Massive Ordnance Penetrator (MOP), a 30,000-pound behemoth designed to burrow through 60 meters of reinforced concrete or approximately 40 meters of moderate rock. However, at the Yazd facility, these specifications collide with the cold reality of physics. The facility’s internal rail lines are buried at depths reaching 500 meters. This depth is not merely a number—it is a functional immunity. The mountain is composed of 300-million-year-old granite, an igneous rock characterized by immense compressive strength and a crystalline structure that dissipates kinetic shockwaves far more effectively than the “moderate rock” used in US Air Force penetration benchmarks. Simple subtraction reveals a 460-meter “dead zone” of solid granite. “The gap between the bomb and the tunnel is not a margin of error. It is a physical impossibility.” Even a direct hit by a MOP is, in geological terms, a mere scratch on the mountain’s skin. The internal railway, running deep within the Earth’s crust, remains entirely insulated from the thermal and kinetic energy expended on the surface.

3. Infrastructure as the Ultimate Weapon

Strategic analysts often obsess over the lethality of the missiles themselves, but in the tunnels of Yazd, the rocket is a secondary concern. The true primary weapon is the permanent rail infrastructure. Since the current cycle of escalation began on February 28, the IRGC has demonstrated that while a missile is a replaceable payload, the automated railway is an invincible delivery system. The facility utilizes a sophisticated rail layout to cycle three critical components through the mountain’s core:

● Warheads: High-explosive payloads stored in hardened vaults, ready for mating with delivery vehicles.

● Transporter-Erector-Launchers (TELs): Heavy-duty rail-bound vehicles that move missiles from deep storage to the launch portals.

● Assembly Halls: Subterranean factories where missiles are readied for flight in a climate-controlled environment, safe from overhead thermal imaging. This mobility creates a survivability loop. A TEL can ride the tracks to an exit, surface briefly to fire toward targets in Arad, Dimona, or central Israel, and retreat into the granite before strike aircraft can even finalize a target lock.

4. The Regenerative Blast Door: A Game of Geometric Whack-a-Mole

The tactical struggle at Yazd has devolved into a high-stakes game of “geometric whack-a-mole.” The mountain features between three and ten separate blast-door exits. Mapping provided by Alma Research and CNN’s satellite analysis has confirmed the complex rail layouts that connect these portals. When one exit is collapsed by a precision strike, the internal rail system simply reroutes the next TEL to a different door. The IRGC utilizes a counter-intuitive process of “regenerative defense” to maintain these portals. When a door is struck and buried, crews backfill the damaged section from the inside with a mix of soil and concrete. This creates a temporary, reinforced seal against secondary strikes. Once the bombing sorties pause, the crews re-excavate the portal. This cycle explains the discrepancy in current intelligence assessments:

● The IDF Acknowledgment: Reports that roughly 60 percent of the surface launch infrastructure has been successfully destroyed.

● The US Estimate: Suggests that 50 percent of the facility’s operational capacity remains fully intact. The difference lies in what can be seen versus what can be used. The “destroyed” portals are often merely dormant, waiting for the rail system to bring them back online.

5. Why a Failed Launch on March 20 Was a Strategic Victory

On March 20, a long-range ballistic missile launched from the complex suffered a boost-phase failure, crashing near Kohistan Park inside Yazd City. While critics pointed to the crash as a sign of technical incompetence, the event actually signaled a major strategic victory for Iranian engineering. The launch occurred after three full weeks of intensive, daily portal bombing. The fact that a missile was able to reach the surface, clear the mountain, and transition to flight at all is a testament to the railway’s resilience. “The launch failed. The fact that it happened at all is the proof.” Technical glitches in the missile’s propulsion are temporary and fixable. However, the fact that the delivery system—the 500-meter-deep rail network—successfully bypassed a twenty-day siege to put a bird in the air proves that the adversary’s air superiority has reached a point of diminishing returns.

6. Conclusion: The Deep Time of Defense

The conflict at Yazd suggests that the future of warfare may not be found in the digital cloud, but in the “deep time” of geology. While modern air power can strip a mountain of its surface features, it cannot reach the organism living within the stone. The 21-mile-wide strait nearby remains under the shadow of a facility that essentially operates on a different timeline. The granite protecting these rails was formed before mammals existed, and it remains the most effective defensive technology in the Iranian arsenal. As long as the 500-meter shield of the mountain remains intact, the railway will continue to deliver its payloads. In the end, the most sophisticated ordnance in the world is no match for the unyielding physics of the Earth itself. The mountain does not care about the mission clock; it simply wins by existing.