Cosmic consciousness
(Mother:) “I am in a universal consciousness at the moment and the earth seems to me to be a very tiny thing, like this (Mother sketches a tiny ball in the air) in the process of being transformed.”
- (Shyam Sundar:) “This morning it is the need of cosmic consciousness that is felt.
(Mother:) The peace of totality.”[1]
(Sri Aurobindo:) “The cosmic consciousness is that in which the limits of ego, personal mind and body disappear and one becomes aware of a cosmic vastness which is or is filled by a cosmic Spirit and aware also of the direct play of cosmic forces, universal mind forces, universal life forces, universal energies of Matter, universal Overmind forces. But one does not become aware of all these together; the opening of the cosmic consciousness is usually progressive. It is not that the ego, the body, the personal mind disappear, but one feels them as only a small part of oneself. One begins to feel others too as part of oneself or varied repetitions of oneself, the same self modified by Nature in other bodies or, at the least, as living in the larger universal self which is henceforth one’s own greater reality. All things in fact begin to change their value and appearance; one’s whole experience of the world is radically different from that of those who are shut up in their personal selves. One begins to know things by a different kind of experience, more direct, not depending on the external mind and the senses. It is not that the possibility of error disappears, for that cannot be so long as mind of any kind is one’s instrument for transcribing knowledge, but there is a new vast and deep way of experiencing, seeing, knowing, contacting things, and the confines of knowledge can be rolled back to an almost immeasurable degree. The things one has to be on guard against in the cosmic consciousness are the play of a magnified ego, the vaster attacks of the hostile forces — for they too are part of the cosmic consciousness — and the attempt of the cosmic Illusion (Ignorance, Avidya) to prevent the growth of the soul into the cosmic Truth. These are things that one has to learn by experience; mental teaching or explanation is quite insufficient. To enter safely into the cosmic consciousness and to pass safely through it, it is necessary to have a strong central unegoistic sincerity and to have the psychic being, with its divination of truth and unfaltering orientation towards the Divine, already in front in the nature.”[2]
(Sri Aurobindo:) “When you become cosmic, even though you speak of yourself as ‘I’, it is not ‘I’. The ordinary ‘I’-ness disappears, and the mental, vital and physical look like representatives of that new consciousness. Ramakrishna speaks of this state as ‘the form of ego left for action’.”[3]
(Sri Aurobindo:) “In the supramental state there will be individual centres of cosmic consciousness. The Supermind will work through the cosmic in these centres according to the truth of their being.”[4]
(Sri Aurobindo:) “Limitation itself, ignorance itself change their meaning for us. Ignorance changes into a particularising action of divine knowledge; strength and weakness and incapacity change into a free putting forth and holding back various measures of divine Force; joy and grief, pleasure and pain change into a mastering and a suffering of divine delight; struggle, losing its discords, becomes a balancing of forces and values in the divine harmony. We do not then suffer by the limitations of our mind, life and body; for we no longer live in these, even when we record and accept them, but in the infinity of the Spirit, and these we view in their right value and place and purpose in the manifestation, as degrees of the supreme being, conscious-force and delight of Sachchidananda veiling and manifesting Himself in the cosmos. We cease also to judge other men and things by their outward appearances and are delivered from hostile and contradictory ideas and emotions; for it is the soul that we see, the Divine that we seek and find in every thing and creature, and the rest has only a secondary value to us in a scheme of relations which exist now for us only as self-expressions of the Divine and not as having any absolute value in themselves. So too no event can disturb us, since the distinction of happy and unhappy, beneficent and maleficent happenings loses its force, and all is seen in its divine value and its divine purpose. Thus we arrive at a perfect liberation and an infinite equality.”[5]
(Mother:) “The individual is only an element in the whole, even as the earth is a part of the solar system, and the solar system makes a part of all the systems of the universe. So just as there is an individual consciousness, there is a group consciousness and a consciousness of the system, a universal consciousness which is made up of the set of all the consciousnesses composing it, plus something, something — something more subtle. Just like you: you have lots of cells in your body; each cell has its own consciousness and you have a consciousness which is the consciousness of your total individuality, though made up of all these small cellular consciousnesses.
- Mother, here it is written: “... there is a wall of separative ignorance between” the individual and the cosmic consciousness. Then how to break down this wall?
Get rid of the ignorance, enter the knowledge.
First of all you must know what I have just told you, that you are a part of the whole, that this whole is a part of a greater whole, and that this greater whole is a part of a still greater whole, right up to its forming one single totality. Once you know that, you begin to become aware that in reality there cannot be any separation between you and something greater than you of which you are a part. This is the beginning. Now, you must come to the point not only of thinking this but of feeling it and even living it, and then the wall of ignorance tumbles: one feels this unity everywhere and realises that he is only a more or less fragmentary part of a whole much vaster than he, which is the universe. Then one begins to have a more universal consciousness.”[6]
- ↑ En Route (On the Path): The Mother's Correspondence with Shyam Sundar, p.139
- ↑ Letters on Yoga – III, p.272
- ↑ Talks with Sri Aurobindo, p.76, 29 December 1938
- ↑ Talks with Sri Aurobindo (Vol. 2), p.884, 16 September 1940
- ↑ The Synthesis of Yoga, p.413, “The Cosmic Consciousness”
- ↑ Questions and Answers 1955, p.232
See also
- Loretta reads Savitri, Book Seven, Canto VII
- Loretta reads Savitri, Book Two, Canto VI
- Oneness
- Nirvana
- Supramental consciousness