World of Philosophy

Author(s): Christopher Key Chapple, Intaj Malek, Dilip Charan, Sunanda Shastri, Prashant Dave
Publisher: Shanti Prakashan

Page 82

judgment. Even were we to be free of such interference of the blind lifeforce and develop an impartial intelligence, this can bring us only uncertain models of reality. We grope for an understanding of what we are, where we are or where we go. But the one who alone inhabits all things and whose form of becoming all things are, knows all things directly, by identity, because all is His self-representation. Between our ignorance and its knowledge is a gulf, but not one which is unbridgeable. The Upanishads deal variously with the building of this bridge using the apparatus of human knowledge. Our senses can be turned inside-out to bring a different and more intimate knowledge of things. Our sense mind can be trained to by-pass the senses and contact directly the inner realities of things. Our intelligence can be made receptive to the rays of a pure intuitive understanding. All these and other paths form the means of developing the intermediate zone of knowledge between our ignorance and the Lord's knowledge, a development which Sri Aurobindo calls building the intuitive mind.
For this, we must first learn to bring to quiescence the clamors of vital desire and mental preference, and we must learn to be receptive to the higher powers of divine knowledge which can in-form our present mental instruments and bring us into union with the divine will and knowledge. Sri Aurobindo spells these higher powers out, in The Synthesis of Yoga as well as in his diary notes, which have been published as the Record of Yoga. He also points out the concern with the development of these powers in the Veda and the Upanishads. The Veda deals with these powers in personified form. Two of them which repeat often in its corpus are Revelation and Inspiration, Ila and Saraswati, the goddesses. But these two Vedic goddesses co-exist, almost as a family of sisters, with two other younger goddesses that precede them: they are Dakshina and Sarama, Discrimination, and Intuition respectively.
The first of these intuitive powers that must grow and settle as a form of intelligence in us is discrimination. This discrimination, the ability to choose between alternatives, is not a mental faculty, based on preconceptions of good and evil. Discrimination is a form of intuition. It has an origin within us in the soul or what Sri Aurobindo calls the psychic being. Plato refers to this inner guidance as the Daemon. It is also accessible from above from the thinking mind, in ranges of consciousness now inactive in us. There is a yoga of the development of discrimination. Its essence lies in the development of an inner mental silence and receptivity to a kind of mental tact, a higher power of certitude that indicates the difference between truth and falsehood, desire and will. Discrimination matures into intuition, intuition matures into truth-seeing and truth-hearing, revelation and inspiration. Thus, truth-seeing and truth-hearing, drishti and sruti, are at the origin of intuition and discrimination; this progression forms the journey or yoga of the discrimination.
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