Transcript of Matthijs' AUM2005 talk: "Sri Aurobindo’s Theory of Knowledge"

Talk by Matthijs Cornelissen
Port Townsend, WA
June 11, 2005

Good Morning,

I'd like to start by thanking Karunamayee because music is such a wonderful way to link us all up and not only to link us together but also to link us to our source. Music is definitely a much more direct way to reach The Divine than words. We speakers are in the somewhat sorry position that we have to communicate with words, and I can only hope that the words I’ll use will create a path that is loose enough and transparent enough, so that still something of the greater truth can seep through.

I also want to thank Richard for organizing all this and for bringing me here, which is wonderful. And of course greater thanks go to Sri Aurobindo and The Mother. The last few days I have been really enjoying being with everybody. The Aurobindo club is quite a nice bunch of kids. I hope you don’t mind that l address you as kids while some of you are much older and wiser than me. But we are really like kids, and what is more, we are like kids who are in a very embarrassing position, -- and I think most of the speakers expressed this in some way or another, -- we are like kids in a class who are asked a question, a very difficult question, and somehow the answer has leaked. We know the answer, because Sri Aurobindo has given us the answer, but we haven’t found the answer ourselves and we don’t really know how he got there, we missed the route. So when we are asked the question we are shy of giving the answer, because if anybody were to ask how we know it, then we have to admit kind of sheepishly that we have copied it from Sri Aurobindo. So that creates a kind of inner tension, because when we speak it is tempting to use the most beautiful words, but then that doesn’t work because when the experience isn’t there then the Truth doesn’t come through. When one can quote literally like Alok, then it is fine, because then the words are so exact that they carry the truth inside. But I don’t have that memory, so I can’t do that. Anyhow I’ll give it a try.

Why do we think we know?
What I want to discuss this morning is something that underlies what we have discussed the previous two days and I hope that together we can go to a greater depth and get into some of the absolute mystery that is behind everything that we do and say. It is a mystery, and this is another embarrassment of speaking, because we know much less than we think. I guess I should talk only about myself, but I think it applies to all of us. We think we know, and this naïve certainty that we can know things is really amazing. We are supposed to make a link with science and even science has this. Science as we now know it is to quite an extent based on the philosophy of Descartes and Descartes is much maligned; but actually he was an amazingly naïve and religious man. What everybody knows is that he said "'Cogito ergo sum”, i.e. "I think, therefore I am" and of course everybody who knows a little about Yoga knows that you can very well be without thinking, and that your real existence has nothing to do with your thought. So we tend to look down on him, but what's most amazing is not that famous sentence, it is one that follows a little later. His attempt was to start with absolute doubt and then find out what would stand as certain knowledge. The first thing he could not doubt was his own thinking. But even when he looked outside, his doubt didn’t go very deep. When he divided the world into two, the inner, thinking part that was to be looked after by religion and the outer, extended part that was to be studied by science, even for the science part, his doubt really didnt go further than the first step. He said, all I can build upon is what the senses give me, and then he added that the senses could not be wrong “because God has given them to us and God cannot be that malicious that he would give us false witnesses.” I think that's really touching and so incredibly naïve. The later existentialists doubted on a much deeper, more psychological level, but even they didnt doubt very deep, because they still took the outer existence as fully real. And of course they took themselves far too serious.

Some ancient Indians like Nagarjuna and some Western mystics like Eckhart carried their doubts much further. And they came to a space where any expression became doubtful and needed to be transcended by something higher that was inexpressible. But still that something higher was there. So it appears that in the last instance we cannot doubt for the full hundred percent. We always assert something and even if we pretend to doubt fully, then we don’t doubt our doubt. So we cannot escape some certainty at the very root of everything, even at the very root of nothing, even Buddha's emptiness is still a pregnant void. We simply cannot escape having somewhere deep inside a certainty. I have always found it very amazing that speakers, even in a group like ours, who know that Reality is far beyond us, still all talk as if they know, me included. I’m saying something, because I believe in it. So that's very, very strange.

I am very puzzled about what really is and I think collectively, we are not remotely puzzled enough about that. Especially Science is still living in an amazing, almost childish world of make-belief, in which we presume that the physical reality is real, and more or less as we see it. It proceeds as if it is sufficient to polish a little bit the obvious defects of our senses, expand them with machinery and equipment, and then go a bit deeper in on their interrelationships, and then that’s it. And it is true that the models science makes of reality are sufficient to make the gadgets we all love so much work. But it doesn’t bring us much closer to the deeper answers to the questions of life. The social sciences have detected the social pressures that influence our thinking, and they do try to get at the truth behind those pressures, but this also remains entirely on the surface.

One can wonder why it is like that. Why do we always think that we know? and why can we not escape this tendency? Within the Indian tradition, this amazing certitude even at every level of ignorance, is perfectly understandable, because it follows, as so many things in psychology, directly from the concept of Sachchidananda. Absolutely at the very root of things, being and knowing, and joy of course, are essentially one. So essentially we know what we are and we are what we know. There can be no gap between the two. We are our own consciousness, we are our own knowledge, however limited and ignorant it is. This is the pervasive presence even in all other types of knowledge of the special type of knowledge, which Sri Aurobindo calls knowledge by identity.

Knowledge by identity, if you really begin to take it seriously and begin to understand all its implications, is an absolutely fantastic concept. Especially if you combine it with Sri Aurobindo's insight in the evolution of consciousness, and with the old Indian idea of many levels and types of consciousness, arranged in layers and patterns between the surface and the inner most psychic being.

The constructed reality of the sense-mind
So let's see how that goes. This may seem a little bit of sidetrack, but if you look at Patanjali’s Yoga sutras, you see that the central point of his whole system is the need to silence the mind. Silencing the mind is for him the very definition of yoga. Sri Aurobindo stresses the need to silence the mind as the very first step of yoga. But how do you do it? There are two big enemies that prevent us from silencing our mind. The first are the desires that come up and keep us continuously busy, and the other are our senses.

When I started with yoga many years ago, I found this very surprising. Desire I could understand. Desire obviously corrupts: when we like something we want to hear that alone, we don’t want to hear the other side, and when desire enters into a discussion, we begin to worry who wins the argument, not who is actually right. So that desires corrupt our thinking is very obvious, but why would the senses corrupt it? The senses at their best make us see beauty, and beauty is very close to truth, and what about systems like some forms of Zen Buddhism which are entirely based on sharpening the senses. So I wondered why in the Indian tradition so much is made of the need to get rid of the senses. Once one understands Sri Aurobindo's theory of knowledge, it becomes very clear why our senses are a problem, and one realises it has nothing to do with disdain for beauty, on the contrary, but it has everything to do with the possibility of cultivating knowledge by identity.

To put it very simply, our problem is that our consciousness is entrapped in the workings of our sense-mind, and our sense-mind is entrapped in the workings of our brain. To get back to the infinite consciousness, which we actually are in our essence, we have to free our consciousness from these entanglements. This is simple enough, but to understand fully, not only how to get out, but also why we got entrapped in the first place, and what might happen after we have liberated ourselves, what the next step could be, that gets quite complicated. The best way to sort all that out, is probably to look at the whole thing in the framework of the evolution of consciousness. I think all of us as we are sitting here are fairly familiar with Sri Aurobindo's concept of consciousness so I can just indicate it very shortly and simply.

The typal planes
Sri Aurobindo says, in line with the entire Vedic tradition, that this physical world is the end result of a process of exclusive concentration by which the Divine manifests the physical world out of himself. On the way from the absolute, indeterminate, infinite, omniscient and all-powerful divine Consciousness to the almost totally inconscient and fully determinate state of physical hard matter, a whole series of intermediate typal planes of conscious existence are created. Science ignores all these intermediate planes (except perhaps one specific layer of the mental worlds which contains the descriptions of a certain class of physical relations and processes). Science deals only with the ultimate end result of that whole process of immersion of the Infinite Brahman into inconscience, matter, and so it studies the physical world which is made out of fundamental particles like, for example, the electrons that circle around in atoms.

Of course these are metaphors. We should not at any moment think that matter really consists of electrons and protons and things like that. An electron is our human conception, our human model, of a part of the material world. There are no such things in reality. Electrons, protons, quarks, and so on are part of our image of reality, just like everything else that we see is a construct of our manas, our sense-mind. Nothing is as it seems to be.

We are so trapped in our sense-mind that we inevitably think that the physical reality we see and feel consists of real stuff, while all that we see as real stuff "out there" is at least partially the product of our mind, it is the result of an interaction between what is out there and our imagination about it. We really live in a virtual world of our own making that is to some extent guided by the world out there, and to some extent by our own pre-knowledge, or prejudice, of how that world should be. It is not an entirely virtual world, there's something out there, but it is certainly not exactly that what we see. What we see is our construction of reality, which is always an interaction of at least two different types of consciousness and being, the conscious being of ourselves as the observer, and the conscious being of what we observe. These interactions create entirely different worlds depending on the type of conscious being, which is there in the observing self and in the observed nature.

I think this is something we lose track of, because we get habituated to live in a certain manner, in a certain type of consciousness, and then we start taking that manner absolutely seriously, but it's arbitrary, the worlds in which we live are the way they are, because we are habituated to construct them that way and we can be shaken out of them. By music, by meditation, by an encounter, by grief, by all kinds of things, we can be shaken out of those habits. And suddenly we are in an entirely different space.

From matter to mind
Now to come back to that electron and proton, let's presume that the world is more or less like scientists model it. Then there are things called electrons, or at least wave-forms that can be considered as little particles, that circle around protons. So those little “things” must have some kind of built in knowledge. Everything must have. The electron must know how to do its thing, just like we must know how to walk, how to ride a cycle, digest food, etc. Riding a cycle is a very good example, because to ride a cycle goes differently than most people think. We think that we go to the left by turning the steering handle to the left, but it doesn’t work like that. You go to the left by shifting your weight to the left, and then, because the fork of the front wheel is a little bent forward, this shift of weight makes you turn left. If you try to force the steering handle left while staying straight-up, you will fall, as all children know who ever had enough courage, will-power (and folly) to try. So the body knows how to do it, while our mind doesn’t know.

In a similar way as the body must know how to ride a cycle, one can imagine that the electron must know how to turn around the proton. Obviously it doesn’t have the type of mental knowledge that we have of the outer world, but it has all the necessary know-how to play its specific role in this huge world. In this context it is useful to note that there is actually no substantial difference between a quality and know-how: one can say that this paper is white, describing its whiteness as a quality, or one can say that this paper has the know-how needed to emit white light. One sounds more active and human than the other but it comes to the same thing. So we can describe the quality of whiteness in this paper as a kind of consciousness that involves a certain “know-how-to-be-white”, a certain knowledge of how to be. At the level of the physical, the consciousness is entirely involved in its own action and in an electron the type of physical consciousness it has, or rather is, is not more than a specific habit of form. The electron we can presume, doesn't go out of its way to make a model of the world in order to decide on its action, it just is its own action. For our type of representational knowledge, we need our sense mind, our fantastically complicated brain and so on. All that is not there in the electron. The electron is far too simple for all that, but, and this is terribly interesting, what little bit it knows, it knows perfectly. This many people have mentioned before. Matter doesn’t lie, it doesn’t make mistakes. It doesn’t have that capacity, because it just is. Even our body just is. It cannot pretend to be something else.

Similarly, our body-consciousness also cannot go out of itself and then make a model of itself and then deal with that model, it just does something, or just is something. It simply is. That it has in common with very simple things like electrons and protons. Now let us see how the ability to respond to the surrounding gets more complicated as things become more complex during the process of evolution. Even electrons have the ability to react to what happens in their surrounding. When another atom comes nearby, an electron may jump to another orbit, so the electron reacts to some extent to its surrounding. Even when the electron is simply racing around the nucleus of the atom in which it “lives”, it is doing that, because it somehow senses the presence of the protons and other electrons there and knows how to behave accordingly, all according to its fixed habits.

As the physical aggregates get more complicated, you get plants, which have very intricate and subtle interactions with their surroundings. The tree moves with the wind, it breathes in some chemicals from the air, it pulls up some chemicals through its roots, it breathes out other chemicals; it has some very subtle and complicated interactions going on with other plants, with the air, with the soil and so on. But basically it is in itself. There is no reason at all to presume that the tree makes any internal representation of what's going on around it. It knows only what it feels directly, and in that sense it is very similar to our vital nature. That is probably why in the Vedic system of classification, which Sri Aurobindo follows, the plants belong to the life world just as our emotions. Emotions also belong to the pranamaya kosha, to the life world, because in our emotions also we don’t make a model of the outside world, we don’t have an objective conception of how the world is. We react directly; it consists of horizontal I and thou kind of relationships. Our reactions to someone else can be very subtle, very complicated, but they are not objective like the mind is. It is direct, in and out.

Making maps
The objective mind becomes possible when our brain-stuff becomes so complex that it can make some kind of a map of the world around it. Our brain is capable of making a hugely complicated representation of the reality in which our organism lives. Of course it is not a map in the sense of the 2D printed maps you can buy of different geographical regions, it is also not a purely verbal map. It is something very, very complex consisting of spatial relationships, smells, sounds, meanings, intentions, reactions, all kind of things.

There area few things that are good to note at this stage. The visual aspect takes up a very large part of our mapping of the world but it is certainly not the whole of it. It is also good to realize that perception is a very active process. Young children generally think, like the ancient Greeks and Indians, that when we see something, a ray goes out from the eye, envelopes the thing, takes its shape and returns. Since the 13th century in Europe this “emissive theory of sight” has lost out on the “immissive” theory, and primary school teachers teach children now that nothing goes out from the eyes and that “in reality” the light from the object falls on our retina, which passively absorbs that light and as a result gives off a signal that goes straight into the brain where we become conscious of it. (How exactly consciousness comes in at this stage, is hard, perhaps impossible to explain in this scheme of things, but that the teacher of course does not betray.) Though there is some truth in what the teacher says, it is only part of the story and in some respects her version is worse than the child’s. The reason for this is that seeing is not a passive process at all. Modern psychology is becoming more and more aware of the extent to which seeing, and sensing in general, are active processes. What we see, is to a very high degree determined by what we want to see, or what we expect to see, or fear to see, but in any case, by some kind of mental set that is determined at least partially from inside. Even purely physiologically, seeing is a very active process. The main centre in the brain where we do our visual imaging of the world has more efferent neurons coming from the back, from the deeper layers of the brain, going out, than it has afferent neurons that come from the eye and go in. Perhaps the full story is something like this that first our consciousness goes, as the ancients and children say, out to the object, and negotiates with the consciousness in the object what kind of information it will receive from it, somewhat like a fax-machine which first negotiates with the fax-machine on the other side of the telephone line what the highest protocol is that both machines can understand, before the real transmission starts. The object then sends that kind of information out and the organism receives it: the purely physical mind gets only physical info, the psychic gets the emotional values attached to the object, the artist its beauty, the mystic the divine presence in its core.

For simplicity’s sake, let us for now focus on the idea that our brain makes a map of reality, because that it does that, in some fashion or another, seems clear enough. Someone has claimed that it can do that because the number of connections in the brain, — there are billions and billions and billions of neuron cells, and billions and billions and billions and billions and more billions of connections between them, — because the number of connections between our brain-cells is about the same as the number of events that have taken place in the universe till now. How anyone could make a guess of the number of events in the universe, I don’t know, but what is sure is that the numbers of neuronal connections are absolutely staggering, and that all this complexity has been squeezed in these little skulls of ours is absolutely incredible. Because of that complexity, we can make quite sophisticated maps of reality, we can calculate the beginning of the universe, construct mobiles, write poetry, make music, and maintain human relationships. We can do things that are actually incredibly complicated. But there is another fascinating aspect to this.

The universe in a speck of dust
When we look at ourselves from the outside, "objectively", we see ourselves as small 5-6 foot high, 60, 70 kilograms creatures on a tiny planet in a medium size solar system, in a small milky away, somewhere in a corner of this enormous universe. But on the other hand, it's we who see it like that. So if we look at things in another way, stressing the subjective aspect, then we can say that this whole universe takes up just one thought in our consciousness, the universe happens somewhere in a corner of our being. And that's true for every one of us. We all can think of the universe, as if it were just one of our many possible thoughts, which is absolutely fantastic. Are we inside that, or is that inside us? There is no way to decide. Now there is nothing special about this idea. Every twelve-year-old who takes his own thinking a bit seriously discovers this problem at some stage, gets worked up about it for a while and then drops it on his pile of unsolved riddles of existence, and gets on with life.

The fascinating point is, at least for those of us who manage to remain forever like twelve-year-olds, that something very similar must be true for every thing in the universe. However little the speck of dust we take, if we turn it inside out, it shows the entire universe hiding within it. Mystics have of course always said so. Mystics say not only that everything is conscious, but also that they can see The Divine in absolutely everything, in big things, in small things, everywhere. In “God’s Labour”, Sri Aurobindo describes how the supramental is there, hidden deep inside matter. To our ordinary mind this sounds quite unbelievable, but then, even for the ordinary mind one can make it at least somewhat plausible. If we take the electron as our example, the logic runs like this:

The electron obviously does not have a mind like we have. It misses the billions upon billions of cross-connected neurons needed to make representational maps of reality in the way we do. And yet, in some other way, each electron must contain in itself all the knowledge of the universe. And this has to be so, even in a very technical pragmatic sense. The reason for this astonishing aspect of reality is, that if an electron wants to move exactly in the right way, which is what it does, it must know everything: it must know all of physics because all the laws of physics form one integrated web and you cannot understand any part really completely, without knowing all of it. It is clear that it must know all about electromagnetism, as its orbit is mainly determined by electromagnetic forces, but gravity also plays a role, and so do so many other forces. Physicists presume that even if we don’t always know exactly how, in reality all physical laws should be interconnected and ultimately derivable form just a few basic elements. And the electron must know whatever laws are there completely because it never makes errors. One of the most basic elements of physics is that if we see something behave erratically, the fault is always ours: we haven’t fully understood what is going on. Anyhow, in a similar way our tiny-winy electron must know all of the world, because the whole surrounding world impacts on it. According to physics there is no limit to influences. If there is a force, the effect of the force becomes smaller at a distance, but it does go on and on, in however small a degree, right to the borders of the universe. So everything influences everything. If our electron would miss out on even a tiny detail of either type of knowledge, it would not move correctly. So if the electron is to move exactly right, which is what it does, then it should know the whole lot of it, in however and implicit manner. And so for an electron to move exactly as it does, it must know everything, point. Obviously not in the way we know, but the knowledge must be there in some implicit way.

There is sill a second angle to this. Earlier, we saw that we can look at qualities as know-how, and vice versa. This is the active side of knowledge. But there is also a passive side to knowledge. If you look at the knowledge available in a system, you can always look at in two ways. One is the dynamic knowledge, the know-how that the system needs to act according to its svadharma, and the other is the information that's passively present in it, and which we could extract out of it if we would take the trouble. For the same reason that the electron must have all the dynamic know-how in the world, it must also have all the passive information about the universe inside.

An example on a slightly bigger scale will make this clearer. A glass of water knows in some way how high it is located above the sea level. The simple reason for this is that I can extract that knowledge out of it: I can boil the water in the glass and measure the temperature at which it starts boiling, and from that temperature I can calculate its height above sea-level. At sea-level it boils at 100 °C, but if I take it 10km up, it may start boiling at 70 degree, or whatever it is. The temperature at which the water boils can tell me how high it is above sea-level. So in some implicit way the information about its height above the earth's surface must be hidden in each cup of water. In a similar way, it must contain the speed by which the earth moves around the sun, for again, if I want to know how fast the earth turns around the sun, I can in principle measure the speed of this glass of water and derive the speed of the earth from there. All the basic information about the solar system must be in there in the glass, because I can take it out from there. In principle, certainly not in practice, but in principle, I can study everything in the universe by studying this one glass of water. And as everything impinges on it, it must in some way have the effect of everything embedded in it.

As this may seem at first sight quite an outrageous idea, it should be possible to raise loads of objections against this reasoning, but in the end I have the feeling that it should be possible to deal with all these objections, for intuitively, it actually does makes sense that all the know-how and all the information in the universe, must be present in each little part of it. Many mystics have said so, and the idea that deep, deep within the omniscient omnipotent Divine is secretly present in each little bit of matter is a deeply satisfying thought.

Maps and the brain
Now let’s see how this works out in bigger things. In a cup, it is still very much like in the electron. Implicitly, non-manifestly, all knowledge must be there in the cup; explicitly, manifestly, there is only a certain habit of form: the only thing the cup knows actively, in a physically manifest way, is how to remain this particular cup under a certain set of circumstances. If it gets too hard a knock, it cannot maintain its form and breaks. One may wonder what happens to its habit of form, once the physical cup has been ground back into dust. It seems plausible to me that the habit of form remains, if not forever then still for a possibly long time after the physical cup has gone. The reason is that the accident that broke the physical cup, did not destroy the habit as such, it only prevented one specific manifestation of it to stick together. Whether this is true or not is in principle very well testable. Sheldrake has done wonderful work in the related area of “morphogenetic fields”, and if interest in such things increases, we can expect much more of this type of research in the future.

Now what happens at our level of complexity? We have this fantastic brain, which is continuously busy, on the one hand to help maintain law and order within the complexity of our organism, and on the other hand to plan and execute external action, which involves maintaining a tremendously complex database about the outer reality, which we will call for shortness sake our map of the world around us. It does this in millions of ways, one of them consists of complicated word schemes like the one I'm brewing now, and by which your poor mind is being beleaguered when you hear or read this.

The interesting thing is that just like the electron is the electron, infinite inside but on the outside limited to being electron-like, and just as the cup is inside the Infinite, and yet on the outside only busy manifesting its specific form of cuppiness, so we are infinite inside, but on the outside we are a peculiar mixture of a basic body-sense, feelings, volitions, intentions, thoughts, memories, plans and what not that seem to be engendered by our brain on the basis of the millions of inputs that reach it at any given moment. In our ordinary physical consciousness, our consciousness simply aligns with whatever the body-embedded mind does, or perhaps rather, as all the mind does is far too complicated, it aligns with a tiny “executive summary” which the mind regularly sends to its own surface. And in its turn, what the mind does in our ordinary physical state is largely what the brain and the rest of the nervous system do, and our consciousness is thus still embedded in a little chunk of matter, even though that chunk of matter is fabulously complicated and capable of “mapping”, or presenting the world around it.

Beyond the maps
Now the fascinating thing is that at this stage in our evolution, we cannot only make an objective map of ourselves and the world around us, but we can also free ourselves from the sense mind, just enough to open up to some environmental influence, as in telepathy, or even, and there it gets really interesting, to enter a state of pure consciousness. The latter especially is not so easy, because the attachment to the sense-mind is an old habit that comes from our evolutionary past. So by habit we identify with our nervous system, or more accurately, with a tiny surface summary of the billions of mental processes that take place in our brain-based sense-mind, but it is not by necessity so, we have the capacity to refuse our thoughts, to throw out anything that's not absolute, to quieten the mind and to enter into an absolute silence. Mystics of all times and cultures have done that, and if one really puts oneself to it, it can be done. There is the famous description of how Sri Aurobindo silenced his mind; most people take slightly longer, but in principle it's something that can be done and many people have reached a state where at least for sometime, when they look inside, there's nothing but a wide open inner space. This is something that can be done. Most people, when they begin to look inside, see an endless flow of useless thoughts popping up continuously, but it's not necessarily so. There can be quiet.

In many esoteric traditions this seems to be the main aim, to get out of the web in which the ordinary consciousness is caught, so that one’s consciousness is not tied any longer to the small map that our body makes of the reality around it, and to reach a kind of absolute inner freedom. At this stage many interesting questions can be asked. The main question is perhaps why a consciousness without content brings with it such an overwhelming sense of liberation, of having reached the Absolute, the Truth, or even The Divine. But our immediate aim in this talk is something much more mundane, and perhaps more immediately practical, and we will concentrate on that. The topic of this talk is knowledge and our immediate next question is what the relation is between this fully automatic, brain-based map-making business, silence of mind, and knowledge?

Now it gets very interesting. We know how to make these maps. Because we do it all the time, and in our ordinary consciousness we identify with our map of reality, and we know also that we can get out of maps altogether in some absolute silence of mind. Now what is knowledge in this context?

What is knowledge?
When people talk about the increase in scientific knowledge, or about the knowledge society, what do they mean by knowledge? It seems to me that much of what we nowadays take for knowledge is at best a poor symbolic reflection of what people used to mean by knowledge.

The confusion probably began when we started writing. Think of a book with a story. What is this book, is it a bound pile of paper with ink dotted all over it in the form of letters, is it the long string of words formed by those letters, or is it the story that somehow got caught in those words and that will remain hidden forever in the patterns of the ink on the paper unless someone reads the book? Does Hamlet exist only in patterns of ink on paper, does he come into existence for as long as someone somewhere reads or watches the play, or is he part of a story that exists in itself, in its own realm of stories, quite independent of individual books and human minds? It appears quite obvious to me that the essence of the book is not the paper but the story printed on it, and that this story exists in its own realm and is only reflected, imprisoned in the letters that are printed on paper. In other words, I’m inclined to think that once created, Hamlet does exist quite independent of printed books and human minds thinking of him.

Since stories got printed, and thousand times more so since computers can process the digital rendering of information, we are getting increasingly confused between maps and the reality they represent. We make a presentation of reality, and then we somehow think that that map is the reality. And then we say that we can store knowledge in libraries, computer disks, and the internet. This is total confusion, because it is not the knowledge that is stored. Computers don’t process knowledge. They process bits, they process electrical current. It is we who give the meaning to the patterns they store and process. It is we who put meaning in, it is we who get it transformed in some material substrate according to rules we have made, and it is we who take the meaning out. The meaning is in our consciousness, the meaning is not in the computer. Someone gave the good example of a thermometer. The thermometer doesn't measure the temperature. It is we who measure the temperature by looking at the thermometer. Computers are far more complex, they process patterns of electrical currents that represent information, but it is only in us that the streams of information finally turn into knowledge. Now it's conceivable that if computers get complex enough, they also begin to know consciously like we do. In the AI community many people believe so, but I have no idea whether that is true or not. I don’t experience my computer as more conscious than my pencil, but I may quite well be wrong. As far as I can see, the camera which is recording the whole proceedings is not more aware of what it is recording than the ceiling. The camera is just a bunch of electronics registering sound and light inputs. But we are conscious, and the more I think about it, the more amazing it appears to me.

We do have this secret ingredient that makes us aware of what we see, and touch and hear, and do, and we are aware of all those things in a highly peculiar manner, we experience it as a 3D world, largely visual but spruced up with the other senses, and in a rather strange and vague way mixed with verbal meanings, a world of which we accept part as our “self” and part as “not-self”, a world forever in flux. Somehow we can get out of that presentation, experience an absolute purity, emptiness, and then have an acute, exhilarating awareness of truth, of reality. And this capacity to get out of the map, this ability to enter the void, become consciousness pure, is the central point of yoga and perhaps the turning point that can make human life really worth the trouble.

Planes of pre-existing knowledge
For knowledge the important point is that once our consciousness is free and in itself, we can try explore these inner realms of conscious being and to tap directly into those typal planes that precede the whole physical manifestation. Sri Aurobindo has several chapters in The Life Divine devoted to these issues, but the most directly relevant is the chapter on “Separative knowledge and knowledge by identity”. He says here that it's absolutely crucial at some stage to become aware of the inner worlds in ourselves. Because that has to be the beginning of an entry into the subtle worlds from where the outer manifest and material worlds are actually being determined. Once we are in those inner worlds then there’s no limit to our possibilities for evolution into a higher harmony, beauty and truth. Sri Aurobindo here also says that even our knowledge of the outer world which seems to be constructed by the sense mind on the basis of the workings of the senses and the nervous system is actually possible only because we know subconsciously already what the world looks like. The sense-based input is only an excuse that triggers a pre-existent knowledge which is already there.

Sri Aurobindo says that all that's there in The Life Divine, all the knowledge that's there in The Synthesis of Yoga, the Foundations of Indian Culture, The Human Cycle and so on, all those things he wrote in the Arya, just came to him pouring down. Historically, physically it must indeed have been like that, because he wrote the Arya in a rather special manner. The Arya came out every month for about 6 years. Sri Aurobindo serialized in each 64 page issue of the Arya, typically one chapter of The Life Divine, one of The Synthesis of Yoga, one of Secret of the Vedas, one of The Ideal of Human Unity and one or two of other books, in total some 5-6 chapters every month. And he did not work on that the whole month. He asked on of his disciples to warn him a week before the text had to go the press, and then he must have written something like one full chapter a day. Many of you must have been writing at some stage, but to write one chapter of The Life Divine in a day is almost physically impossible, it's really amazing. And he did not make mistakes; we have many of his manuscripts, and they clearly just came, to perfection. Later he did make changes, but again in those changes there were hardly ever mistakes; there were, once in a while, but extremely rare, and always minor things like commas.

Sri Aurobindo describes the higher mind as a state in which knowledge comes entirely ready-made from above. And it has the unitary vision of the global whole. The higher mind is not partial or one-sided, the higher mind understands the harmony of the whole. And if you go there, it is quite fancy, because the answers come first and the questions afterward, and the answers come with all their connections. Like a huge interconnected web that straight away gets the whole point. How to put that kind of knowledge into words may also be given, or it may remain a problem, but that broad understanding is there straight away. All that was written in the Arya, Sri Aurobindo ascribes to the higher mind, which in Sri Aurobindo's later hierarchy is only the lowest plane above the ordinary mind. There are many people who seem to have reached similar levels, because we can see from their writing that they have that global vision, but Sri Aurobindo discovered later a whole hierarchy of worlds of a higher consciousness above it.

Top-down and bottom-up
What should we understand by knowledge pouring down? Cognitive science says that we generate knowledge by the chemistry in our brain, on the basis of the input from our physical senses, probably in the form of patterns of synapses or whatever the physical substrate is. The social scientists add another layer of complexity saying that everything we know is a social construct. But Sri Aurobindo says that the knowledge in these books descended like that, as a continuous stream of intuitive thoughts. In standard science, when intuition is discussed, it is seen as a very fast subconscious processing of known facts, but that is something entirely different. Sri Aurobindo calls that pseudo-intuition, because the real intuition, doesn't come horizontally, it also doesn’t come from below; it comes ready-made from above. Once more, what does that mean? Is that a real possibility? And if it is, how does that relate to the constructed knowledge in the physical brain?

There is a more or less similar phenomenon within the physical plane itself. Here the outer physical reality seems to be only the final expression, the final condensation of what manifest first in the subtle physical. It seems to be like that because when you contact the subtle physical you can sometimes see there things that are bound to happen in the future, because in that subtle plane they have already happened. Similarly there are subtle mental planes where the ideas are already ready before they crystallizes in our language. Sri Aurobindo says that all knowledge is basically already there, it pre-exists our human awareness of it. And if you silence your mind you can sometimes see how ideas enter your mind from other realms.

I had one student who described it very nicely. We were doing a little silencing exercise in the class, and most students then described how the mind goes on buzzing, darting off, then on this sidetrack and then on that, but this kid said, "it's not difficult, you just stop these thoughts from coming in” and she meant it. I don’t know if she had read Sri Aurobindo about this, she may have or may not have, but you could clearly see that she was simply describing what she was actually doing. She apparently identified with the pure Purusha, and in that inner silence, she was seeing how thoughts come in, and she could stop them right there at the point of entry. It's rare that someone of that age, 20 or so, can do that and can see it so clearly, but that's what she did. The idea comes in, very thin and ethereal, and once it is in the mind, it clothes itself, it dresses itself up with words, and then it's too late, then you cannot get it out anymore. Most of us miss that first part, so we know what we think only after we have thought it, after the idea has solidified itself into words. We don’t catch the idea at the moment that it comes in.

Many people who have studied the history of science say that science moves in leaps and bounds. Someone has one bright idea which gets formulated more or less perfectly right at the beginning, and then there are hundreds of other scientists who just corroborate that idea. So it moves in spurts. The people who initiate those jumps are the ones that really bring science further, and some of them have described how they got to their ideas in a sudden intuition.

A mathematician friend of mine, who is not doing any form of yoga, told me once that he was very concerned that in the teaching of mathematics people stress so much the proving stage where you try to show that the thing is really true. This is a laborious and technical process, and though it takes time, it is generally not that difficult. But, he said, what we don’t teach at all is how to get at the initial intuition. Another mathematician I know expressed the same idea, when he told me that in mathematics people first “see” the solution and then with their knowledge and their experience they fill in the details on how to get there, but they don’t get at the solution by the same road by which they prove it afterwards. The initial insight comes ready-made from above, and then the proof is built up from the bottom. Perhaps it is somewhat like with a building: the owner starts with a vague idea, then the architect makes exact building plans and the engineers work them out in all technical detail, and then finally the craftsmen build it from the bottom up, brick by brick. But the original plan did not come from the bottom up, it came just like that from above, and was refined, detailed out in a series of mixed up-down and down-up interactions. I think we'll get in the afternoon to education and obviously, if one really grasps this, education should be entirely different. We should allow children to stay in contact with the inner, higher knowledge much longer, so that they can get used to it, trust it, and learn from there.

There are many interesting aspects to this dual process. We tend for example to think of science, especially physics as dealing with the physical reality, but this is only half of the truth. Physics is half mathematics. Math is not a physical reality at all, it's a purely mental stuff. Physics moves ahead sometimes by mathematics going ahead first and sometimes by experiments getting there first, but in the end both are needed to make a solid step forwards. What we see at the moment is a fast increasing knowledge of the physical domain and at the same time we are become more and more sophisticated mentally. We become better and better at playing in those mental worlds that somehow render in the mental domain, in the mental substance, some aspects of the physical world.

The Psychic Being
To close, I still want to say something at least about the psychic being because that’s really the most important part of us. As we all know, in Sri Aurobindo's yoga the psychic being came to occupy a larger and larger place as time went on. And it's quite interesting why this is so, and why this is different from the previous systems of yoga and meditation. If you just want to reach the absolute, you definitely don’t need the psychic being. You can go there, it is one path, but there are 1000s of other paths. You can follow any path, and as long as you follow it to its absolute end, it reaches the absolute, and whether you reach the absolute this way or that way, really doesn’t matter that much because what you want is to get rid of the relativities in which the ego gets entangled.

But the psychic being, as the centre of our own nature, is absolutely crucial for the transformation and indispensable for a new creation that's fully conscious. The main reason for this is simply that the psychic being is the divine kernel in us. So it is the most important part of us, it is what we actually are in the very core of our incarnate being. But to get there we have explore all those in between layers that determine our outer nature. And it's only when we have that full knowledge that we can begin to think of transformation. We have to know why we say what we say, why we do what we do, everything that's going on inside. We have to become entirely transparent, there can be no dark spots left, because as long as they are there, the supramental cannot get in. It's simple, straightforward. We have to go to that secret that’s behind all this, to our absolute kernel, and from there we can begin to work on the rest of our nature. This psychic reversal is essential, but it is not sufficient because we have also to reach those higher layers of consciousness above the ordinary mind. In other words, we have to get the full spiritual transformation as well, because only then will we have the full knowledge which Sri Aurobindo obviously had, and even that full knowledge again is not sufficient. Is like what Ron said in the morning: Integrality is not a joke, it is not just amalgamating things

There's a chapter in The Life Divine where Sri Aurobindo goes on saying, that higher and higher layers of consciousness are still not integral enough. He first describes the higher mind and when you read the description you think, wow, that's it. And then he says that's not enough, and then he describes the illumined mind where you have direct visions of the truth beyond verbal thought. He describes it as a sea of lightning. It's very far beyond a simply inspired mind, and then again he explains why that's not integral enough. Then he goes to the intuitive layer, the source of the two previous layers, where there's absolute truth beyond words and forms. It is beyond the vision mind, it is beyond the unitary mind, it is beyond thought, it's absolute truth, as high as you can reach on an individual level. Then again that's not yet it, and then he describes the Overmind, which is entirely beyond the ego, which is cosmic, which is vast, which has a full opening to the transcendent. But even that is not integral enough. And then when you are completely blasted and spaced out, he says something about the Supermind which I won't even quote because I don't understand it. Only then he says that that's the real truth that creates the worlds. Now that supramental reality is entirely beyond our sense mind. So you should never think that we can have a supramental consciousness as long as we look at the world from outside. The supermind does not need the sense-mind. We are caught in that sense mind, which is in principle the same mind that dogs have; we have our intellectual super-layer, but, in a way, that's just making life complicated. Our higher faculties help us to jump out of our routine once in a while, write a piece of nice poetry, do something special, but as far as most of our life goes, it is not that different from the way dogs live. We haven’t got much further, we do things in a more complicated and sophisticated manner, but the basic principle is still the same. For the supramental this will not do. We have to go entirely beyond the sense-mind. Even physically, literally, the sense-mind is based on reflections, it is based on seeing surfaces, and the supramental consciousness is not reflective, it is a knowledge that comes directly from within. Sri Aurobindo describes it as a consciousness where every little particle of our being, every little cell of the body is itself conscious of its divine origin; it knows its connection with the world, and from that inner strength and Light, does its true job in the world.

Mother describes that at the end of her life she could see better with her eyes closed than with her eyes open. There are many people who have had that experience, she is not the only one. Our knowledge about reality does not need to come through our senses. We can live from within and we can have that Truth in every little part of our being. The transformation Sri Aurobindo envisages is very much more radical than people think. This doesn’t mean that people cannot work even now on their bodily consciousness, that they cannot work on the consciousness of the cells. The Divine, I think is, is in a hurry, she is very busy, and she works on all those planes simultaneously. Even our increasing knowledge about the physical and mathematical reality, is part of the process. She is working that out so that we can do there things, it's a cliché, but we can do there things that have never been done before. When you travel, for example, it's fantastic, you get into an airplane which is just like a cinema hall and you don’t travel, at least you have no sense of movement except a little bit at takeoff and landing, otherwise you just get in and you get out somewhere else. And this is very significant, it is getting very close to gross-physical bi-location, being in one place and being in another place at the same time, and this is now common place. Anybody who watches TV is instantly somewhere else. The farmer in India spends half his time in Bombay and a quarter in NY and then only the little rest in his own village. We all live in a loose virtual space, we have left our bondedness to earth. We begin to do things with matter that are quite far out. Where are you when you talk through a telephone, are you here, are you there, are you no-where? Our whole sense of space has collapsed. Even time is becoming strange. Any time you have a moment of infinity in your day, one second of eternity in your experience, your whole perspective on the day changes. If for a minute you enjoy your eternal soul, then it looks that anything before that was ages ago, so a day can look infinitely long, while years can just pass by like that. Both time and space have disappeared. Something essential is changing even in our stupid physical sense mind.

The Divine is working on all those things at the same time but the saving grace is in the finding of the eternal being in yourself. There is no way we could get an immortal body before we know we are immortal in any case. There are these beautiful stories in the Upanishads where Indra comes to Prajapati to learn the knowledge that makes immortal. They are strange stories because Indra is already immortal as it is. But in the story he wants to get “the knowledge that makes immortal” so that he can fight the Asuras better. It must mean that he wants to find his eternal being, so that from that sense of eternity he can fight the dark forces in his mind. He stands for the lord of the mind and the mind can fight the darkness in itself only when it knows its eternal origin. And in us that is the knowledge of the psychic.

Summary
The “ordinary” world of which our sense-mind makes such entrancing representations, is a mixed world in which ever more sophisticated types of consciousness are embodied in ever more complex physical substrates. Besides this evolving mixed world, there are also typal worlds, where different types of consciousness form static worlds of their own. Everything in existence, whatever its size, and whatever the plane of consciousness on which it exists, carries deep within it all the knowledge, power and joy of the Divine.

The symbolic, representational knowledge that plays such an enormous role in our knowledge-society is actually the symbolic rendering of one particular form of knowledge, somewhere half-way between the totally embedded knowledge that we find in matter’s “habit of form”, and the truth-ideas of the supramental plane which are the ultimate blueprints for all that exists. Our ordinary waking consciousness identifies itself with the workings of the sense-mind, which is in its turn largely determined by the workings of the nervous system which through the immense complexity of its interconnectedness can embody complex maps of reality. Still, even the knowledge of this sense-mind is secretly informed by our pre-existing knowledge from within. All our knowledge, whether outwardly triggered by our senses and laboriously built-up by our sense-mind, or inwardly triggered by ready-made intuitions from the higher planes of pre-existing knowledge, is in the end not more than an evocation, an awakening of the knowledge we have already within us. To the extent that we can silence the brain-based sense mind, we can become more aware of the inner knowledge in its purity and intrinsic power. The silent brain-based mind can then be used as a passive instrument to express that inner knowledge in the outer physical world.

If we approach the higher knowledge through a movement in our subtle body upwards towards the sahasrara, we open ourselves to the impersonal knowledge planes above the ordinary mind. Though liberating and exhilarating, the higher knowledge obtained here is of a general, impersonal nature, and does not help us directly with the conduct of our individual lives. For this we need to go inwards to psychic being deep behind the heart, where our individual divine kernel is situated. It is this centre that can guide our individual transformation from a being living in ignorance to a fully divinised centre of consciousness in matter. To accomplish this we need first a full psychic conversion, not only of our essential being, but also of our instrumental nature, and then to bring the higher types of consciousness down into every corner of our being, right into the lowest recesses of the inconscient.

There is still much to do. Happy Journey!