Mental being: Difference between revisions

From Auroville Wiki
Jump to navigation Jump to search
No edit summary
No edit summary
 
(15 intermediate revisions by the same user not shown)
Line 1: Line 1:
==Sri Aurobindo on the Mental==
{{Fresh}}
===A consciousness which measures, limits===
<div align=center>
<div style="font-family:serif;"><big>"'''Mind''' in its essence is a consciousness which measures, limits, cuts out forms of things from the indivisible whole and contains them as if each were a separate integer. Even with what exists only as obvious parts and fractions, Mind establishes this fiction of its ordinary commerce that they are things with which it can deal separately and not merely as aspects of a whole. For, even when it knows that they are not things in themselves, it is obliged to deal with them as if they were things in themselves; otherwise it could not subject them to its own characteristic activity. It is this essential characteristic of Mind which conditions the workings of all its operative powers, whether conception, perception, sensation or the dealings of creative thought. It conceives, perceives, senses things as if rigidly cut out from a background or a mass and employs them as fixed units of the material given to it for creation or possession. All its action and enjoyment deal thus with wholes that form part of a greater whole, and these subordinate wholes again are broken up into parts which are also treated as wholes for the particular purposes they serve. Mind may divide, multiply, add, subtract, but it cannot get beyond the limits of this mathematics. If it goes beyond and tries to conceive a real whole, it loses itself in a foreign element; it falls from its own firm ground into the ocean of the intangible, into the abysms of the infinite where it can neither perceive, conceive, sense nor deal with its subject for creation and enjoyment."</big><ref>Sri Aurobindo, ''The Life Divine'', pp.162-63</ref></div>
''[[On Education]]<br>
“Mental Education”


===A mind of light===
[[File:On_Education_-_Mental_Education.jpg|border|link=http://wiki.auroville.org.in/w/images/5/5a/On_Education_-_Mental_Education.pdf]]<br>[http://wiki.auroville.org.in/w/images/5/5a/On_Education_-_Mental_Education.pdf <small>PDF (6 pages)</small>]
<div style="font-family:serif;"><big>A new humanity means for us the appearance, the development of a type or race of mental beings whose principle of mentality would be no longer a mind in the ignorance seeking for knowledge. Instead, it would be possessed already of what could be called a mind of light, a mind capable of being truth conscious and manifesting in its life a direct in place of an indirect knowledge.<ref>Sri Aurobindo, "Mind of Light", Bulletin of Physical Education, August 1950</ref></big></div>
</div>


==See Also==
*[[Parts of Being]]


==References==
“It is only gradually, very slowly, through the movements of life and a more or less careful and thorough education that you begin to have sensations which are personal to you, feelings and ideas which are personal to you. An individualised mind is something extremely rare, which comes only after a long education; otherwise it is a kind of thought-current passing through your brain and then through another’s and then through a multitude of other brains, and all this is in perpetual movement and has no individuality. One thinks what others are thinking, others think what still others are thinking, and everybody thinks like that in a great mixture, because these are currents, vibrations of thought passing from one to another. If you look at yourself attentively, you will very quickly become aware that very few thoughts in you are personal. Where do you draw them from? — From what you have heard, from what you have read, what you have been taught, and how many of these thoughts you have are the result of your own experience, your own reflection, your purely personal observation? — Not many.<br>
<references/>
&nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp;Only those who have an intense intellectual life, who are in the habit of reflecting, observing, putting ideas together, gradually form a mental individuality for themselves.”<ref>''[[Questions and Answers 1957-1958]]'', p.44</ref>
 
 
:''“And in the head?<br>
Ah! In the head it is all the perversions of thought, all the treacheries — treacheries, there is a huge number of them: one betrays one’s soul so often and so persistently, it is frightful — all the decisions, the points of view and favourable explanations, as I was telling you, and then a kind of habit of criticising... What one doesn’t want to hear, when there is something higher which makes you feel your fault, there is a habit of immediately finding an explanation and a severe criticism of the idea or thought; or else some people turn it into ridicule; there are people who immediately oppose it with another idea or some commonplace notion or other. You can’t imagine the bazaar there is in the head! It is something terrible. If you were to look really objectively at what is going on in there, it is frightful — before you put some order, see clearly, arrange all that, see that two contradictory ideas are not lined up parallel.<br>
&nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; I know a large number of people who shelter in their minds contradictory ideas, not organised or synthesised — there is no question of a synthesis for them — but like... an almost fraternal cohabitation among things which are mortally opposed, that is, ideas which cannot lodge together. You can arrange them in a vast synthesis but that of course is a work of a higher order; yet two things, two ideas which have absolutely contradictory consequences in action and are absolutely contradictory explanations of the same fact... and these two things are there, side by side, they are even sometimes so close that one feels they are joined and live together without being troubled by the ridiculousness of their association.”<ref>''[[Questions and Answers 1955]]'', p.90</ref>
 
 
“A new humanity means for us the appearance, the development of a type or race of mental beings whose principle of mentality would be no longer a mind in the ignorance seeking for knowledge.  Instead, it would be possessed already of what could be called a mind of light, a mind capable of being truth conscious and manifesting in its life a direct in place of an indirect knowledge.”<ref>''[[Essays in Philosophy and Yoga]]'', p.585</ref>
 
 
{{#ask:[[Topic::mental being]]
|?Year
|format=broadtable
|link=all
|sort=Year
|order=descending
|mainlabel=Articles about the mental being
|searchlabel=... further results
|class=sortable wikitable smwtable
}}
 
 
<hr>
<br>
<references />
 
 
==See also==
*[[Mind]]
*[[Intelligence]]
*[[Intuition]]
*[[Mental plane]]
 
==External links==
*[https://vimeo.com/208774507 Mental (Our Many Selves) - Video presentation by Lynda Lester (25:28)]
 
<br>
 
[[Category:Parts of being and planes of consciousness]]

Latest revision as of 11:23, 3 September 2019

On Education
 “Mental Education”

On Education - Mental Education.jpg
PDF (6 pages)


“It is only gradually, very slowly, through the movements of life and a more or less careful and thorough education that you begin to have sensations which are personal to you, feelings and ideas which are personal to you. An individualised mind is something extremely rare, which comes only after a long education; otherwise it is a kind of thought-current passing through your brain and then through another’s and then through a multitude of other brains, and all this is in perpetual movement and has no individuality. One thinks what others are thinking, others think what still others are thinking, and everybody thinks like that in a great mixture, because these are currents, vibrations of thought passing from one to another. If you look at yourself attentively, you will very quickly become aware that very few thoughts in you are personal. Where do you draw them from? — From what you have heard, from what you have read, what you have been taught, and how many of these thoughts you have are the result of your own experience, your own reflection, your purely personal observation? — Not many.
         Only those who have an intense intellectual life, who are in the habit of reflecting, observing, putting ideas together, gradually form a mental individuality for themselves.”[1]


“And in the head?

Ah! In the head it is all the perversions of thought, all the treacheries — treacheries, there is a huge number of them: one betrays one’s soul so often and so persistently, it is frightful — all the decisions, the points of view and favourable explanations, as I was telling you, and then a kind of habit of criticising... What one doesn’t want to hear, when there is something higher which makes you feel your fault, there is a habit of immediately finding an explanation and a severe criticism of the idea or thought; or else some people turn it into ridicule; there are people who immediately oppose it with another idea or some commonplace notion or other. You can’t imagine the bazaar there is in the head! It is something terrible. If you were to look really objectively at what is going on in there, it is frightful — before you put some order, see clearly, arrange all that, see that two contradictory ideas are not lined up parallel.
          I know a large number of people who shelter in their minds contradictory ideas, not organised or synthesised — there is no question of a synthesis for them — but like... an almost fraternal cohabitation among things which are mortally opposed, that is, ideas which cannot lodge together. You can arrange them in a vast synthesis but that of course is a work of a higher order; yet two things, two ideas which have absolutely contradictory consequences in action and are absolutely contradictory explanations of the same fact... and these two things are there, side by side, they are even sometimes so close that one feels they are joined and live together without being troubled by the ridiculousness of their association.”[2]


“A new humanity means for us the appearance, the development of a type or race of mental beings whose principle of mentality would be no longer a mind in the ignorance seeking for knowledge. Instead, it would be possessed already of what could be called a mind of light, a mind capable of being truth conscious and manifesting in its life a direct in place of an indirect knowledge.”[3]


{{#ask:Topic::mental being |?Year |format=broadtable |link=all |sort=Year |order=descending |mainlabel=Articles about the mental being |searchlabel=... further results |class=sortable wikitable smwtable }}



  1. ↑ Questions and Answers 1957-1958, p.44
  2. ↑ Questions and Answers 1955, p.90
  3. ↑ Essays in Philosophy and Yoga, p.585


See also

External links


Retrieved from "https://www.wiki.auroville.org.in/w/index.php?title=Mental_being&oldid=35313"