Opening Remarks
The birth of Mind upon our earth marks a transition from the unconsciously driven animal to a self-conscious being. This transition begins with the advent of mind and the stirrings of a mental consciousness in the human brain.
Chaos of true and false
All was a chaos of the true and false,
Mind sought amid deep mists of Nescience;
It looked within itself but saw not God.
Mind, by its nature is a seeking intelligence. The capacity to reflect and look within and discern is born with the mind. But the full development of these capacities takes a long evolutionary journey. The Night of Inconscience is still too heavy upon the lids of earth. Its seeing is partial and mixed and easily prone to deception. It tries to look within but finds no Truth or God.
An interim diplomacy
A material interim diplomacy
Denied the Truth that transient truths might live
And hid the Deity in creed and guess
That the World-Ignorance might grow slowly wise.
Yet this incapacity and error and ignorance is allowed since thus alone can matter and matter-based life can awaken slowly to the Light. The mind must first turn towards gross objects before it can grasp the subtle. Therefore its denial of God and Truth is itself part of the grand plan. At best this little mind can conjure God in certain fixed formulas of Religion and creed and cults. Yet the secret Influence grows and the world slowly grows wiser.
Imbroglio made by the sovereign Mind
This was the imbroglio made by sovereign Mind
Looking from a gleam-ridge into the Night
In her first tamperings with Inconscience:
Its alien dusk baffles her luminous eyes;
Her rapid hands must learn a cautious zeal;
Only a slow advance the earth can bear.
This play of truth and error, light and darkness is has been permitted by the sovereign Mind or the supreme Intelligence that has sent a little ray of Light from a far ridge into this world of Darkness so that it may slowly awaken to the Light. The first steps are cautious steps lest too much light blinds us.
Unlike the earth’s strength
Yet was her strength unlike the unseeing earth’s
Compelled to handle makeshift instruments
Invented by the life-force and the flesh.
Our physical body organises devices and instruments that we know as organs for the life force to flow and act through us. But it is the mind that really controls them. Mind is the subtle agency that is the end-user and temporary master until the soul within steps out and takes charge. Through these earthly instruments the mind tries to reach beyond the earth and adventure into other domains.
Doubtful images
Earth all perceives through doubtful images,
All she conceives in hazardous jets of sight,
Small lights kindled by touches of groping thought.
The sensory apparatus devised by material nature is merely a channel for contact with the outer world. But the master sense that gives form and shape and meaning and sense to what is being thus received is the mind. It lends conception to perception and awareness to sensation.
Expelling Nature’s mystic unity
Incapable of the soul’s direct inlook
She sees by spasms and solders knowledge-scrap,
Makes Truth the slave-girl of her indigence,
Expelling Nature’s mystic unity
Cuts into quantum and mass the moving All;
She takes for measuring-rod her ignorance.
The mind perceives through the senses that transmit bits and pieces of information through their imperfect channels. Then it assembles and puts together these bits and pieces to build some kind of a coherent picture. This the mind calls as apparent fact. But what it misses is the soul that stands behind and flows into the material picture and the mystic unity of Nature that is one single continuum and not an assemblage of separate divided units. Mind cannot fathom this since by its very nature it measures out the totality into bits and parts for thus alone can it perceive things.
Infant sovereignty
In her own domain a pontiff and a seer,
That greater Power with her half-risen sun
Wrought within limits but possessed her field;
She knew by a privilege of thinking force
And claimed an infant sovereignty of sight.
In its origin the Mind is indeed a seer who mediates between the absolute Truth and this world of relativities. It is like a half risen sun whose other half is concealed in some higher hemisphere of Existence. But here this power labours within the limits set for it by material nature. She tries to go beyond these limits by the power of thought that tries to understand the field of its working. Yet is it still an infant might taking the first few steps towards Knowledge and the Wisdom beyond it.
The Archangel’s gaze
In her eyes however darkly fringed was lit
The Archangel’s gaze who knows inspired his acts
And shapes a world in its far-seeing flame.
There is in the Mind a light that is surrounded by dense rings of ignorance. This light has come with it descending from the realms of the great gods who inspire it. Thus seeing things, however partially, in that light our mind builds its own world in which our being dwells.
Boundaries of subtle power
In her own realm she stumbles not nor fails,
But moves in boundaries of subtle power
Across which mind can step towards the sun.
In its highest realms the Mind can be seen and experienced as an unerring power of intuition that works within fine boundaries. Beyond these highest realms of the Mind is the full blaze of the Supramental Truth from which the Mind derives its light and might even though limited within the boundaries of ignorance.
Ungrasped Omniscience
A candidate for a higher suzerainty,
A passage she cut through from Night to Light,
And searched for an ungrasped Omniscience.
The little mind is like a training ground for something much higher. The mind’s climb can go far bordering on realms of greater Knowledge. Its evolution is far from over. It is moving from the night of ignorance towards the light of a perfect Knowledge searching for the All-knowing Wisdom whose steps are sure.
Closing Remarks
The little Mind is a step that nature takes in its climb towards the Divine Mind . The mind’s early lights presage a far greater Dawn yet to arise.
