Mind

(Mother to Ambu:) “Open your mind like a silent cave and I shall come in there also.”

(Sri Aurobindo:) “The mystic’s experience of mind, especially when it falls still, is not that of an abstract condition or impalpable activity of the consciousness; it is rather an experience of a substance — an extended subtle substance in which there can be and are waves, currents, vibrations not physically material but still as definite, as perceptible, as tangible and controllable by an inner sense as any movement of material energy or substance by the physical senses.”

(Sri Aurobindo:) “Mind is not a faculty of knowledge nor an instrument of omniscience; it is a faculty for the seeking of knowledge, for expressing as much as it can gain of it in certain forms of a relative thought and for using it towards certain capacities of action. Even when it finds, it does not possess; it only keeps a certain fund of current coin of Truth — not Truth itself — in the bank of Memory to draw upon according to its needs.”

(Mother to Mona Sarkar:) “You know, one should keep the mind calm, so as to think methodically and express oneself clearly. One thing should follow the other by analogous expressions and develop logically the thing one wants to express. One must develop the knowledge and read Sri Aurobindo's books to develop clarity in thought. The thought should be clear, limpid and pure, so that what you want to express may become transparent and translucid to the readers. Let him get the picture of what you have in your mind, the exact projection, like a film, of your sentiments and your emotions; there should be a clarity and a lucidity in the thought to better express what you want to say. Your thoughts are a bit bizarre, disordered. The mind should be clear and luminous in order to express, logically and methodically, the idea that you see and subsequently the development of a series of consequences that determine the result and the conclusion that follows. The process of reasoning follows a logical direction which evokes the impression you have in your head, clearly, reasonably.
         Then, one can develop the other faculties of the mind. And after all this work of developing, making supple, coordinating and absorbing in order to better understand in a total and simultaneous way, one must know to silence everything so as to contemplate things sublime and profound. Then comes those stages which surpass the mind – and suddenly one is bathed by an illumination, or a ray of intuition enters in you and you are transported into regions of beauty, of grandeur and of vastness.
         This is the beginning of a new life.”

(Mother:) “The mind is also an instrument of action. The thoughts form plans. The mind forms a plan of action and with this formation of independent and active entities which I mentioned earlier, it stirs the other parts of the being — the vital and physical — and impels them to action. It often happens that you think of some action or other — you don’t do it immediately, but the thought that wants to manifest in this action returns again and again. Perhaps you hear in your mind the words, “I must do that, I must do that,” until you leave everything and do what you have ‘thought’. Well, that is the mind’s power of action. Before you get it, you must learn to organise, harmonise and control your mind. But when you have that power, you can begin to act purposefully, whereas most people are tossed about by thoughts whose formation they were not even aware of.
         There are many people whose thoughts come from outside, who have not taken the care to organise their mind, which is a sort of public square. So all the thoughts coming from outside meet there; sometimes there are clashes: you don’t know what to do, you can’t see anything clearly, etc. There are also people who live in a more or less neutral mental state. Suddenly, they find themselves with someone whose mind is well organised and they begin to think clearly — about things that they knew nothing of a minute ago. There are others, on the other hand, who normally think very clearly and know exactly what is going on in their minds. But they come into contact with certain people and everything gets confused, vague and muddled. They lose the thread of their thoughts and forget what they wanted to say. This is an effect of contagion and this mental contagion is constant. There are very few people who do not receive thoughts from outside. I have known people — many people — who, for example, had a very strong faith, who could see very clearly into themselves, who knew very well what they wanted to do, etc. But when they were with other people and tried to grasp all that, to express it, they could no longer find it; instead, there was something that moved in a sort of semi-obscure confusion and they felt incapable of formulating their thought, which before had been quite clear.”

(Sri Aurobindo:) “We spoke once of individual minds as worlds that are distinct and separate from one another; each is shut up in itself and has almost no direct point of contact with any other. But that is in the region of the inferior mind; there your own formations close you in; you cannot get out of them or out of yourself; you can understand only yourself and your own reflection in things. But here in this higher region of the unexpressed mind and its purer altitudes you are free; when you enter there, you go out of yourself and penetrate into a universal mental plane in which each individual mental world is dipping as if into a huge sea.”

(Mother to sadhaks, 1929:) “There is in us a higher mind which moves in the region of disinterested ideas and luminous speculations and is the originator of forms, and there is a mind of pure ideas that have not yet been put into form; these greater mind-levels are free from the vital movements and the adverse forces, because they stand far above them. There may be contradictory movements there; there may be movements and formations that come into clash with the Truth or are in conflict with one another; but there is no vital disturbance, nothing that can be called hostile. The true philosopher mind, the mind that is the thinker, discoverer, maker of forms, and the mind of pure ideas that are not yet put into form, are beyond this inferior invasion and influence.”

(Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine:) “But if we suppose an infinite Mind which would be free from our limitations, that at least might well be the creator of the universe? But such a Mind would be something quite different from the definition of mind as we know it: it would be something beyond mentality; it would be the supramental Truth. An infinite Mind constituted in the terms of mentality as we know it could only create an infinite chaos, a vast clash of chance, accident, vicissitude wandering towards an indeterminate end after which it would be always tentatively groping and aspiring. An infinite, omniscient, omnipotent Mind would not be mind at all, but supramental knowledge.”

(Shyam Sundar:) “The mental light no longer seems a light before the sun.

(Mother:) If by ‘sun’ you mean the supermind, it is unquestionable.”

---

See also

• Thought
• Mental being
• Conversation
• Telepathy
• Loretta reads Savitri:Two.XI "The Kingdoms and Godheads of the Greater Mind" part 2