This must be the most compelling and elegant summary you have written so far. Thank you for this.
I still struggle with any concept of “evolution” whenever I happen look around. “Mental consciousness [cannot] integrate the force of life to such an extent as to turn it into a spontaneously effective instrumentation“, indeed, but dear God we do try! Our petty self-centeredness knows no limits, or should I say that ultimately it will be just that, a point, a thing without a periphery, the triumph of a ghost? On the other hand, this so called “primitive man”, who lived in a bygone era of superstition, stupidity and death, enjoyed two important things that we miss. The first one is history, sixty thousand years give or take, which is a fairly decent amount in biological terms. What they did, whatever is that they did, which is unknown and unknowable to our minds, worked. The second one is attention (probably history is just a consequence of attention after all). De Martino and Eliade used to call this form of being “presence”, Heidegger called it “dasein”. In any case, what matters is that it bears no relation to what we call individual consciousness in the cartesian sense.
The interesting question is, do we think that we, scrapping for a two syllable footnote in life’s history book, can ever match the first without getting hold of the second? The answer from the individual ghost of modernity is yes, yes we can (as if he wasn’t actually talking!). But obviously we know that this is not true, the ghost is not talking “for ourselves”; we want instead to get hold of attention, which is still entirely up for grabs. We are still the same humans after all, not a single cell of their bodies was an animal cell. That is the true nature of hope. Everything else is a footnote.
From your quotes here I will definitely need to read SA, once I get there.
A couple of small comments on the text. “.. or something very much like it”, you can do it in simple terms with Polanyi’s idea of boundary conditions in the production of speech from vocabulary and grammar, or his analogy of holographic (material) images and the subsequent “vectorial quality of meaning”, which is entirely non-objective, mental if you like (see any of his essays in “Knowing and Being” or “Meaning”, he repeats the same idea everywhere).
This is kind of obvious, but your complementary presentation of an Ultimate Constituent versus a standpoint on the multiplicity of the manifested world, corresponds, parsi passu, to the converging of two historical worldviews: that of the Eastern Tradition with that of twentieth century Process Philosophy. The idea that the latter never went beyond the mere study of the relata events and relations, in order to hypothesise an immanent ultimate reality, is a well known fact, they were all scientists after all (see for example Langdon Gilkey or Steven Rockefeller in “Religion and Nothingness” companion seminar book). PIQM seems to be doing just that integration.
Had Einstein read Bankei, he would have immediately grasped that the answer to his burning question was right before his eyes. The answer to this so called “mystery” is called the Unborn. Bankei would say that the mystery is the definitive proof of the Unborn just as it is, like our hearing of sparrows chirping in the background. You would say, on the other hand, that the mystery is instrumental in the manifestation of the Unborn.
Thank you, Adrian. It was indeed a summary of many of last years posts, hence the many embedded links. But it also contained ideas I hadn’t put forward yet, like that of Spirit “turning itself inside-out.” Yes indeed we try
... to turn the force of life into a spontaneously effective instrumentation; this can be the noblest thing a mentally conscious being can do, short of becoming a supramentally conscious being, which takes us pretty far into the future and involves concepts pretty far from the contemporary universe of discourse. The “ghost” will triumph only when it has consciously and dynamically become the only thing as well as all there is. This requires evolution in a direction as it were orthogonal to the self-destructive direction of endless mental development (to which the wrong way of trying leads).
Regarding the so called primitive man (and also to whet your appetite for Sri Aurobindo) I reproduce here a relevant passage [LD 71–75]:
"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 intuitional* knowledge. This is the highest possible state of our knowledge when mind fulfils itself in the supramental.
* [Sri Aurobindo’s footnote] I use the word “intuition” for want of a better. In truth, it is a makeshift and inadequate to the connotation demanded of it. The same has to be said of the word “consciousness” and many others which our poverty compels us to extend illegitimately in their significance.
"... 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. ***And this process which seems to be a descent, is really a circle of progress.*** For in each case the lower faculty is compelled to take up as much as it can assimilate of what the higher had already given and to attempt to re-establish it by its own methods. By the attempt it is itself enlarged in its scope and arrives eventually at a more supple and a more ample self-accommodation to the higher faculties. Without this succession and attempt at separate assimilation we should be obliged to remain under the exclusive domination of a part of our nature while the rest remained either depressed and unduly subjected or separate in its field and therefore poor in its development. With this succession and separate attempt the balance is righted; a more complete harmony of our parts of knowledge is prepared."
A shout of thanks to the Information Philosopher [https://www.informationphilosopher.com/about/] Bob Doyle for drawing my attention to a significant difference between the original German version of Einstein’s quote about the comprehensibility of the world and its English translation, which I quoted. In the English translation we read:
> One may say “the eternal mystery of the world is its comprehensibility.”
In the original German Einstein writes:
> Man kann sagen: Das ewig Unbegreifliche an der Welt ist ihre Begreiflichkeit.
More literally translated:
> One may say: the eternally incomprehensible thing about the world is its comprehensibility.
The rhetorically strong juxtaposition of “Das Unbegreifliche an” (the incomprehensible thing about) and “ihre Begreiflichkeit” (its comprehensibility) has sadly been lost in translation. The popular internet version “The most incomprehensible thing about the world/universe is that it is comprehensible” (with nearly 33,000 hits) thus is more faithful to the original than the “official” translation by Jean Piccard in “Ideas and Opinions by Albert Einstein” (Crown Publishers, 1954, p. 292).
Hi Bhaskar, thanks for asking. I just checked how many times the word “separative” occurs in Sri Aurobindo’s Collected Works: 293 times. One of the first instances is this (The Life Divine p. 148):
“In the animal and in man with his conscious mentality this separative tendency of the Mind induces it to regard itself also as a separate existence, the conscious subject, and other forms as separate objects of its mentality. This useful arrangement, necessary to life and the first basis of all its practice, is accepted by the mind as an actual fact and thence proceeds all the error of the ego.”
Because we are so shut up in our minds, and have only the most indirect and conjectural knowledge of other peoples' minds, there is actually a problem in Western academic philosophy that is known as “the problem of other minds”: I have one, do you? To supramentally conscious beings, by contrast, there is only one consciousness, the supermind. They are conscious of themselves and each other as one being and one consciousness experiencing the world and acting in it from multiple standpoints. To them, there are not “other” superminds.
Thanks for your kind response. I imagined the supramental consciousness as part of the multiplicity with individuals or beings with varying degrees of luminance according to their saturation of supramentalized physical, the supramental being a property of their mental vital and physical sheathes as well as a power on its own plane. But this is due to my conventional thinking and associated separativism as you have clearly illustrated. Thank you for including Sri Aurobindo's philosophy in the article as the physics examples don't always compute in my 'dumb brain'.
To mental consciousness, everything is a separate thing. To supramental consciousness, the One is everything, and everyone contains everything. It is completely beyond mind to imagine what the world is like to the supermind and (considering that the supermind is the original power creative of the world) what the world will be like to us mental beings once the supermind is fully embodied amongst us. It’s harder to get one’s mind around this than to get it around quantum mechanics. By the way, being many things isn’t all bad. What would be the fun (in Upanishad speak, bliss/ananda) in being ONLY one? What’s bad (in Upanishad speak, ignorance/avidya) is to be ONLY many.
This must be the most compelling and elegant summary you have written so far. Thank you for this.
I still struggle with any concept of “evolution” whenever I happen look around. “Mental consciousness [cannot] integrate the force of life to such an extent as to turn it into a spontaneously effective instrumentation“, indeed, but dear God we do try! Our petty self-centeredness knows no limits, or should I say that ultimately it will be just that, a point, a thing without a periphery, the triumph of a ghost? On the other hand, this so called “primitive man”, who lived in a bygone era of superstition, stupidity and death, enjoyed two important things that we miss. The first one is history, sixty thousand years give or take, which is a fairly decent amount in biological terms. What they did, whatever is that they did, which is unknown and unknowable to our minds, worked. The second one is attention (probably history is just a consequence of attention after all). De Martino and Eliade used to call this form of being “presence”, Heidegger called it “dasein”. In any case, what matters is that it bears no relation to what we call individual consciousness in the cartesian sense.
The interesting question is, do we think that we, scrapping for a two syllable footnote in life’s history book, can ever match the first without getting hold of the second? The answer from the individual ghost of modernity is yes, yes we can (as if he wasn’t actually talking!). But obviously we know that this is not true, the ghost is not talking “for ourselves”; we want instead to get hold of attention, which is still entirely up for grabs. We are still the same humans after all, not a single cell of their bodies was an animal cell. That is the true nature of hope. Everything else is a footnote.
From your quotes here I will definitely need to read SA, once I get there.
A couple of small comments on the text. “.. or something very much like it”, you can do it in simple terms with Polanyi’s idea of boundary conditions in the production of speech from vocabulary and grammar, or his analogy of holographic (material) images and the subsequent “vectorial quality of meaning”, which is entirely non-objective, mental if you like (see any of his essays in “Knowing and Being” or “Meaning”, he repeats the same idea everywhere).
This is kind of obvious, but your complementary presentation of an Ultimate Constituent versus a standpoint on the multiplicity of the manifested world, corresponds, parsi passu, to the converging of two historical worldviews: that of the Eastern Tradition with that of twentieth century Process Philosophy. The idea that the latter never went beyond the mere study of the relata events and relations, in order to hypothesise an immanent ultimate reality, is a well known fact, they were all scientists after all (see for example Langdon Gilkey or Steven Rockefeller in “Religion and Nothingness” companion seminar book). PIQM seems to be doing just that integration.
Had Einstein read Bankei, he would have immediately grasped that the answer to his burning question was right before his eyes. The answer to this so called “mystery” is called the Unborn. Bankei would say that the mystery is the definitive proof of the Unborn just as it is, like our hearing of sparrows chirping in the background. You would say, on the other hand, that the mystery is instrumental in the manifestation of the Unborn.
Thank you, Adrian. It was indeed a summary of many of last years posts, hence the many embedded links. But it also contained ideas I hadn’t put forward yet, like that of Spirit “turning itself inside-out.” Yes indeed we try
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6NXnxTNIWkc&ab_channel=4NonBlondesVEVO]
... to turn the force of life into a spontaneously effective instrumentation; this can be the noblest thing a mentally conscious being can do, short of becoming a supramentally conscious being, which takes us pretty far into the future and involves concepts pretty far from the contemporary universe of discourse. The “ghost” will triumph only when it has consciously and dynamically become the only thing as well as all there is. This requires evolution in a direction as it were orthogonal to the self-destructive direction of endless mental development (to which the wrong way of trying leads).
Regarding the so called primitive man (and also to whet your appetite for Sri Aurobindo) I reproduce here a relevant passage [LD 71–75]:
"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 intuitional* knowledge. This is the highest possible state of our knowledge when mind fulfils itself in the supramental.
* [Sri Aurobindo’s footnote] I use the word “intuition” for want of a better. In truth, it is a makeshift and inadequate to the connotation demanded of it. The same has to be said of the word “consciousness” and many others which our poverty compels us to extend illegitimately in their significance.
"... 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. ***And this process which seems to be a descent, is really a circle of progress.*** For in each case the lower faculty is compelled to take up as much as it can assimilate of what the higher had already given and to attempt to re-establish it by its own methods. By the attempt it is itself enlarged in its scope and arrives eventually at a more supple and a more ample self-accommodation to the higher faculties. Without this succession and attempt at separate assimilation we should be obliged to remain under the exclusive domination of a part of our nature while the rest remained either depressed and unduly subjected or separate in its field and therefore poor in its development. With this succession and separate attempt the balance is righted; a more complete harmony of our parts of knowledge is prepared."
Btw: All of Sri Aurobindo’s (so far) published writings are available in PDF format here: https://www.sriaurobindoashram.org/sriaurobindo/writings.php
He is a master of the written word, and for the little I can gather, of thought as well.
And if we have to settle for coming back upon itself rather than “evolution”, I can take that. Will think about what he says the next few days.
A shout of thanks to the Information Philosopher [https://www.informationphilosopher.com/about/] Bob Doyle for drawing my attention to a significant difference between the original German version of Einstein’s quote about the comprehensibility of the world and its English translation, which I quoted. In the English translation we read:
> One may say “the eternal mystery of the world is its comprehensibility.”
In the original German Einstein writes:
> Man kann sagen: Das ewig Unbegreifliche an der Welt ist ihre Begreiflichkeit.
More literally translated:
> One may say: the eternally incomprehensible thing about the world is its comprehensibility.
The rhetorically strong juxtaposition of “Das Unbegreifliche an” (the incomprehensible thing about) and “ihre Begreiflichkeit” (its comprehensibility) has sadly been lost in translation. The popular internet version “The most incomprehensible thing about the world/universe is that it is comprehensible” (with nearly 33,000 hits) thus is more faithful to the original than the “official” translation by Jean Piccard in “Ideas and Opinions by Albert Einstein” (Crown Publishers, 1954, p. 292).
What did you mean by: (In contrast, there are no “other” superminds.) Is the Supermind too singular like the Ultimate Constituent?
Hi Bhaskar, thanks for asking. I just checked how many times the word “separative” occurs in Sri Aurobindo’s Collected Works: 293 times. One of the first instances is this (The Life Divine p. 148):
“In the animal and in man with his conscious mentality this separative tendency of the Mind induces it to regard itself also as a separate existence, the conscious subject, and other forms as separate objects of its mentality. This useful arrangement, necessary to life and the first basis of all its practice, is accepted by the mind as an actual fact and thence proceeds all the error of the ego.”
Because we are so shut up in our minds, and have only the most indirect and conjectural knowledge of other peoples' minds, there is actually a problem in Western academic philosophy that is known as “the problem of other minds”: I have one, do you? To supramentally conscious beings, by contrast, there is only one consciousness, the supermind. They are conscious of themselves and each other as one being and one consciousness experiencing the world and acting in it from multiple standpoints. To them, there are not “other” superminds.
Thanks for your kind response. I imagined the supramental consciousness as part of the multiplicity with individuals or beings with varying degrees of luminance according to their saturation of supramentalized physical, the supramental being a property of their mental vital and physical sheathes as well as a power on its own plane. But this is due to my conventional thinking and associated separativism as you have clearly illustrated. Thank you for including Sri Aurobindo's philosophy in the article as the physics examples don't always compute in my 'dumb brain'.
To mental consciousness, everything is a separate thing. To supramental consciousness, the One is everything, and everyone contains everything. It is completely beyond mind to imagine what the world is like to the supermind and (considering that the supermind is the original power creative of the world) what the world will be like to us mental beings once the supermind is fully embodied amongst us. It’s harder to get one’s mind around this than to get it around quantum mechanics. By the way, being many things isn’t all bad. What would be the fun (in Upanishad speak, bliss/ananda) in being ONLY one? What’s bad (in Upanishad speak, ignorance/avidya) is to be ONLY many.