इन्द्रियाणि पराण्याहुर् इन्द्रियेभ्यः परं मनः ।मनसस्तु परा बुद्धिर् यो बुद्धेः परतस्तु सः ॥
indriyāṇi parāṇyāhur indriyebhyaḥ paraṁ manaḥmanasastu parā buddhir yo buddheḥ paratastu saḥ
Supreme, they say, (beyond their objects) are the senses, supreme over the senses the mind, supreme over the mind the intelligent will; that which is supreme over the intelligent will, is he (the Purusha).
Compiled rendering · Anilbaran Roy
Essays on the Gita
Supreme, they say,
His translation
KRISHNA It is craving, it is wrath, the child of Rajoguna, Mode of Passion. Know him for the Fiend, the Enemy of man’s soul here upon earth, a great devourer, a mighty sinner. As a fire engirt with smoke, as a mirror covered with dust, as the unborn child with the caul, so is the universe by him enveloped. By him knowledge is besieged and girt round, O son of Coonty, by this eternal enemy of the wise, this insatiable fire of desire and passion. The senses, the soul and the overmind, these are the places of his session, with these he cloudeth over knowledge and bewildereth the embodied spirit. Therefore in the beginning constrain the senses, O lion of the Bharats, and slay that accursed with the sword of Knowledge and Discernment. High, say the wise, reign the senses, but the heart is higher than they & the overmind is higher than the heart, he who is higher than the overmind, that is He. Thus when thou hast understood Him who is higher than the overmind, slay thy enemy, O strong-armed, even that terrible and invincible one, whose shape is passion.
Essays on the Gita
This order of evolution seems contrary to that which we perceive as the order of the material evolution; but if we remember that even Buddhi is in itself an inert action of inconscient Nature and that there is certainly in this sense an inconscient will and intelligence, a discriminative and determinative force even in the atom, if we observe the crude inconscient stuff of sensation, emotion, memory, impulsion in the plant and in the subconscient forms of existence, if we look at these powers of Nature-force assuming the forms of our subjectivity in the evolving consciousness of animal and man, we shall see that the Sankhya system squares well enough with all that modern enquiry has elicited by its observation of material Nature. In the evolution of the soul back from Prakriti towards Purusha, the reverse order has to be taken to the original Nature-evolution, and that is how the Upanishads and the Gita following and almost quoting the Upanishads state the ascending order of our subjective powers. “Supreme, they say,”3·42 beyond their objects “are the senses, supreme over the senses the mind, supreme over the mind the intelligent will: that which is supreme over the intelligent will, is he,”—is the conscious self, the Purusha. Therefore, says the Gita, it is this Purusha, this supreme cause of our subjective life which we have to understand and become aware of by the intelligence; in that we have to fix our will. So holding our lower subjective self in Nature firmly poised and stilled by means of the greater really conscient self, we can destroy the restless ever-active enemy of our peace and self-mastery, the mind’s desire.
The Kshara spirit visible to us as all natural existence and the totality of all existences moves and acts pervadingly in the immobile and eternal Akshara. This mobile Power of Self acts in that fundamental stability of Self, as the second principle of material Nature, Vayu, with its contactual force of aggregation and separation, attraction and repulsion, supporting the formative force of the fiery (radiant, gaseous and electric) and other elemental movements, ranges pervadingly in the subtly massive stability of ether. This Akshara is the self higher than the buddhi3·42 — it exceeds even that highest subjective principle of Nature in our being, the liberating intelligence, through which man returning beyond his restless mobile mental to his calm eternal spiritual self is at last free from the persistence of birth and the long chain of action, of Karma. This self in its highest status, paraṁ dhāma, is an unmanifest beyond even the unmanifest principle of the original cosmic Prakriti, Avyakta, and, if the soul turns to this Immutable, the hold of cosmos and Nature falls away from it and it passes beyond birth to an unchanging eternal existence. These two then are the two spirits we see in the world; one emerges in front in its action, the other remains behind it steadfast in that perpetual silence from which the action comes and in which all actions cease and disappear into timeless being, Nirvana. Dvāv imau puruṣau loke kṣaraś cākṣara eva ca15·16.
The Synthesis of Yoga
And yet Mind also, our mentality, our thinking, understanding part, is not our Self, is not That, not the end or the beginning; it is a half-light thrown from the Infinite. The experience of mind as the creator of forms and things and of these forms and things existing in the Mind only, the thin subtle basis of idealism, is also a delusion, a half-view taken for the whole, a pale refracted light idealised as the burning body of the Sun and its splendour. This idealist vision also does not arrive at the essence of being, does not even touch it but only an inferior mode of Nature. Mind is the dubious outer penumbra of a conscious existence which is not limited by mentality but exceeds it. The method of the traditional way of knowledge, eliminating all these things, arrives at the conception and realisation of a pure conscious existence, self-aware, self-blissful, unconditioned by mind and life and body and to its ultimate positive experience that is Atman, the Self, the original and essential nature of our existence. Here at last there is something centrally true, but in its haste to arrive at it this knowledge assumes that there is nothing between the thinking mind and the Highest, buddheḥ paratas tu saḥ, and, shutting its eyes in Samadhi, tries to rush through all that actually intervenes without even seeing these great and luminous kingdoms of the Spirit. Perhaps it arrives at its object, but only to fall asleep in the Infinite. Or, if it remains awake, it is in the highest experience of the Supreme into which the self-annulling Mind can enter, but not in the supreme of the Supreme, Paratpara. The Mind can only be aware of the Self in a mentalised spiritual thinness, only of the mind-reflected Sachchidananda. The highest truth, the integral self-knowledge is not to be gained by this self-blinded leap into the Absolute but by a patient transit beyond the mind into the Truth-consciousness where the Infinite can be known, felt, seen, experienced in all the fullness of its unending riches. And there we discover this Self that we are to be not only a static tenuous vacant Atman but a great dynamic Spirit individual, universal and transcendent. That Self and Spirit cannot be expressed by the mind’s abstract generalisations; all the inspired descriptions of the seers and mystics cannot exhaust its contents and its splendours.
Writings in Bengali
Srihak does not want to tread that path; he is eager to make the country strong through the power of intellect. I have no objection; let everyone act according to their own thoughts and inspirations. The direct point is that for one who considers this intellect to be paramount, the concept of Yoga is nothing but a riddle and self-deception. The very first foundation of Yoga is that there is something beyond intellect, yo buddheḥ paratastu saḥ (He who is beyond the intellect). The development and purification of the intellect are indeed necessary. Either by first realizing God through the self-established vision that opens the closed doors of the intellect, or by experiencing Him in the secret recesses of the heart, and then transcending the intellect. The Gita also says, buddheryah param buddhva samstabhyaatmanamatmana (Knowing Him who is beyond the intellect, steadying the self by the Self). He who is above the intellect, understanding Him with the help of an intellect greater than itself, it is ordained to subordinate the smaller self to the greater Self, the little ‘I’ to the big ‘I’, the human ego to the indwelling Supreme Self (Paramatma Purushottama). The path of the rationalist and the path of the seeker of the Self (atmavadi) are different; the laws of motion, power, and faith are distinct; the language of the traveler is also distinct. Both Srihak and I use the word ‘God’ (Bhagavat), but his intellectual conception of God and my inner experience of Him have not the slightest resemblance. The word is one, the meaning different. What use is argument in such a case? If he writes in English and I in French, with a similar outcome, the same result is likely here. I can understand his English, but why would he understand my French? I understand his state of mind, it is a common human sentiment; it is not that I too did not once have similar thoughts, arguments, and doubts when I was a rationalist, atheist, or agnostic, and had not directly perceived God. My state and direct experience (direct experience) he has not had. When one does not know a thing, the language in which it is expressed is merely the language of empty imagination for him. Srihak’s imagined God is banished from the human mind-field; I have no objection. No one can banish the true God – not Srihak, not Voltaire, not materialistic science. He moves the atheist, He moves the theist too; He is the indweller of all, the all-controller.
Letters
Certainly, the realisation of the Spirit comes long before the development of Overmind or Supermind; hundreds of sadhaks in all times have had the realisation of the Atman on the higher mental plane, buddheḥ parataḥ, but the supramental realisation was not theirs. One can get partial realisations of the Self or Spirit or the Divine on any plane, mental, vital, physical even, and when one rises above the ordinary mental plane of man into a higher and larger mind, the Self begins to appear in all its conscious wideness. It is by full entry into this wideness of the Self that cessation of mental activity becomes possible; one gets the inner Silence. After that this inner Silence can remain even when there is activity of any kind; the being remains silent within, the action goes on in the instruments and one receives all the necessary indications and execution of action whether mental, vital or physical from a higher source without the fundamental peace and calm of the Spirit being troubled.
