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Permalink Reply by PuzzleSolver on July 20, 2013 at 4:53pm

The consciousness of the seer, is a greater power for knowledge than the consciousness of the thinker. The perceptual power of the inner sight is greater and more direct than the perceptual power of thought. ~ Sri Aurobindo

In the Isha Upanishad, a distinction is made between “The Seer” and “The Thinker”. Sri Aurobindo comments on this distinction: “There is a clear distinction in Vedic thought between Kavi, the Seer and Manisi the thinker. The former indicates the divine supra-intellectual Knowledge which by direct vision and illumination sees the reality, the principles and the forms of things in their true relations, the latter, the laboring mentality, which works from the divided consciousness through the possibilities of things downward to the actual manifestation in form and upward to their reality in the self-existent Brahman.”

The power of the Illumined Mind is one of “vision” not “thought”. Sri Aurobindo describes it in this way: “A consciousness that proceeds by sight, the consciousness of the seer, is a greater power for knowledge than the consciousness of the thinker. The perceptual power of the inner sight is greater and more direct than the perceptual power of thought: it is a spiritual sense that seizes something of the substance of Truth and not only her figure; but it outlines the figure also and at the same time catches the significance of the figure, and it can embody her with a finer and bolder revealing outline and a larger comprehension and power of totality than thought-conception can manage.”

The characteristic action of the Illumined Mind is therefore not a higher power of the thinking mind or organised, logical sequenced verbalization, but rather an action of “Truth-sight” and “Truth-light” “It can effect a more powerful and dynamic integration, it illumines the thought-mind with a direct inner vision and inspiration, brings a spiritual sight into the heart and a spiritual light and energy into its feeling and emotion, imparts to the life-force a spiritual urge, a truth inspiration that dynamises the action and exalts the life-movements; it infuses into the sense a direct and total power of spiritual sensation so that our vital and physical being can contact and meet concretely, quite as intensely as the mind and emotion can conceive and perceive and feel, the Divine in all things; it throws on the physical mind a transforming light that breaks its limitations, its conservative inertia, replaces its narrow thought-power and its doubts by sight and pours luminosity and consciousness into the very cells of the body.” This is in fact the fulfillment of the seer, the spiritual mystic.
Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine, Book 2, Part 2, Chapter 26, “The Ascent Towards Supermind”

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