Stilling the mind
A practical essay on a key aspect of Yoga
Sri Aurobindo’s yoga gathers the classical paths into a single point: to let the Light descend from above, through the consent to the cessation of thought (and in this very descent that Light is also Kuṇḍalī).
Such was the experience of Śrī Aurobindo, as he would describe it in a letter many decades later: “something else than himself took up his dynamic activity and spoke and acted through him but without any personal thought or initiative. What this was remained unknown until Sri Aurobindo came to realise the dynamic side of the Brahman, the Ishwara and felt himself moved by that in all his Sadhana and action”.
Śrī Aurobindo would then teach the stilling of thought as a means to promote the descent of the Light, as is prescribed in virtually all yogas; but in his own case it happened otherwise: the Light descended, and with it the thoughts fell silent, and only afterwards did he learn to abide in the absence of thought (“stilling the mind does not mean killing it, but making it a silent and passive instrument”). Yet it would seem that thoughts cannot truly be stilled unless one has already entered a state of consciousness where discursive movements no longer exist; and this is precisely what the teachings affirm, including those of Śrī Aurobindo: whenever the thoughts do fall silent, that very silence is the threshold of access. But it is not possible to still the mind without the intervention of that state which many call Kuṇḍalinī — for this, and nothing else, is the manifestation of Kuṇḍalinī, pure and a-causal in itself. This is the meaning of saying that Rāja-yoga presupposes Haṭha-yoga, the two domains having the same object, Kuṇḍalinī, regarded from different moments or standpoints.
For Śrī Aurobindo, then, the decisive moment is the cessation of thought; just as in Kashmiri Śaivism the essential condition is vikalpakṣaya (the dissolution of dualizing thought), and in Tantric Buddhism the psycho-organic realization of Śūnyatā (emptiness): the fulfillment of the Haṭha-yoga mode is the very entry into the Rāja-yoga mode. The passage just cited from Śrī Aurobindo concerns precisely the state he experienced once thought had come to a halt: discursive thinking ceased, that is, the ordinary mind vanished, and the ego was no more — for the ego is but the puppet-king of dualizing thoughts. The mind stood free, emptied of its phantoms, constituted only of its own true nature; and the knowing and being-known thereby (or rather the ever deeper recognition of oneself in it) then becomes yoga.
For Śrī Aurobindo, it is not sufficient to remain at the level of the mere surpassing of the ego and the concomitant mutual interpenetration of the self and the All. This stage (which he names the Overmind) is no doubt a striking attainment, inconceivable to the ordinary mind, and already grants the possibility of living beyond Karman (as in the Tibetan ‘Buddha of the Three Times’ or as promised by the Goddess Kālī, the destroyer of Time) — yet one can go still further.
And this ‘beyond,’ the Supermind, was, in my view, also reached by Śrī Aurobindo through—paradoxically—his analytical, Western mental formation: it was precisely his consummate mastery of the ‘Aristotelian’ mind, in its purely aseptic dimension (a level that even Aristotle himself could not attain), which enabled him to sustain detachment even from the Overmind, and thereby to ascend and move within the Supermind. What is meant here is that while Aristotle explored the logic of the rational mind—unidirectional, categorical, and self-referential—Śrī Aurobindo, like all yogins, lived within a different logic, one that may be described, in brief, as non-local and free of entitative fixation. Yet it may well be that the very systematic character of Western thought also contributed in its way to accompany him into the realm of the supramental Divine. In other words, the pre-theoretical, the pre-predicative, the pre-representational is not a-logical, but rather possesses a logic of its own—one that is not merely deeper or broader than rational logic, but altogether different. It is only rationalism, grafted upon the representational mind, that believes its paltry logic capable of comprehending reality; herein lies its self-referentiality. And this stance is so self-referential that it does not even perceive that it must overturn the plain and literal meaning of what was said by those who preceded the Aristotelian-analytical turn of Western thought, in order to usurp their words and thus childishly deceive itself into believing in something it contrives to name ‘the true’.
Take Plato as a paradigmatic example. Almost all philosophers and men of letters regard him as the first rationalist; and even those who do not entirely do so still read him as though they were reading Aristotle. They carry with them the granite-like certainty that what appears true within their small, cultivated garden of knowledge—fruit of assiduous reading—must be what Plato in fact was saying. Leaving aside the obvious point that to believe knowledge consists in the mere piling up of notions and concepts is itself purely self-referential, one must nonetheless stress that philosophers and men of letters fail to see that the nucleus, the very heartbeat, the conditio sine qua non of reading Plato lies in recognizing that, at every decisive juncture, whenever he speaks of true knowledge, he says and repeats in every possible way that reason is only a limited means of knowing, and that precisely because of its intrinsic limits it cannot grasp anything real (Aristotle, by contrast, would come to believe that reason is the sole source of knowledge). For Plato there is a stage beyond reason; yet what do the luminaries of Western thought do, if not flatten this Platonic ‘beyond’ into the bleak confines of their own barren rationality? Nor do they even suspend judgment, as more than a few from Pyrrho to Husserl have urged, for this would evidently undermine their Hegelian compulsion to ‘have to know.’ Needless to say, each understands what he can and wishes to understand; yet the objective conduct of usurping sources in order to distort them amounts to nothing other than placing oneself among the Gospel’s blind guides. This—namely, the relentless drive to reduce what is presented as beyond reason by him who speaks to what is merely rational for him who reads—might almost pass for a jest, were it not the tragic truth; yet so it is with the world. The learned reduce Plato’s Republic to an oligarchy, unable to grasp that, for him, the dialectical philosophers are those who emerge from darkness into light. The mere reader, who only reads and reads, must insist that this be a metaphor—for what the learned do not know must, by their reckoning, be false (this sub-rational mechanism is, if one notices, precisely the same that eradicates the xenos in the Sophist when refuting the eristics); and so, from on high, their elliptical judgment descends. Another Platonic example: everyone knows it was he who first spoke of Atlantis in the Western world (already a limitation in itself—how can one fail to see that there are worlds beyond the Western one?). What Plato essentially said was that ‘there was’ a civilization prior to history, now lost; and he mentioned it only in passing, as it suited his purposes, unconcerned that legions of future scholars would philologically pontificate at the height of their learning, enclosed within fanciful literary enclosures like monks in early medieval abbeys, without even bothering to note that Atlantis is, if anything, attested by Plato, but in fact consists of millions of tons of megaliths whose sheer physical presence speaks for itself. Yet archaeologists too are nothing but Hegelian scholars, trapped in their own ‘need to explain’ everything through their prejudices—thus reinforcing the vicious circle that has become the morass now called Western culture: readings upon readings, concepts upon concepts, prejudices upon prejudices, each thinker sealed inside his own cubic millimeter of conceit.
The philosophers and men of letters just referred to do nothing more than pursue the current of their discursive thought: far from suspending it, they are carried along by it, spinning out inferences woven of empty concepts, believing whatever happens to arise in their minds. This, and nothing else, is the ego — the phantasm of representation, whole cathedrals of concepts and words. It is precisely this vikalpa that, according to the yogas, must be arrested if one is to gain access to true knowledge — not the facile reading of texts, but the direct experience of the mind’s own nature. To discourse about vidyā before those who ‘believe themselves to know’ that it does not exist is not, in truth, something to be undertaken; Plato himself already said as much.
From past to present, one of the central theses of cognitive neuroscience is that within the brain — in the left hemisphere — there exists ‘the interpreter’, which weaves the data acquired by the brain into a continuous narrative, and this is said to constitute consciousness. Yet this ‘interpreter’ is nothing but self-referential consciousness, that is, the ordinary mind, the ego itself. Kuṇḍalī, with her radiant cobra eyes, silences this incessant chatter.
To still the mind, as has been said, is not something one can actively do but something that must occur; it marks the threshold of entry into higher states of consciousness. For once the background noise of thought — whether foolish or learned — is removed, one begins to know oneself. And who says this? Plato himself.