Aperspectival Consciousness

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Discussion

The perspective from the 'Supermental' consciousness theory of the Aurobindo school

(Source: Agenda of an Integral Consciousness Mutation/ World Transformation, Sri Aurobindo International Centre of Education, Puducherry, India [1] )

Ulrich Mohrhoff:

"The manifestation of the supermind presupposes the liberation of the consciousness that is presently locked up in the automatisms of the body, through the liberation of the body from its automatic mode of functioning. This task, which was begun by Sri Aurobindo, was continued by the Mother, who left behind a prodigious document of her experiences on the way.

Today I shall offer a few glimpses of the process of supramental mutation/transformation as it has been recorded by the Mother, mostly through her own notes.

- It’s as if the consciousness were no longer in the same position with respect to things, so they appear totally different. The ordinary human consciousness, even the broadest, always occupies the center position, and things exist in relation to that center: in the human consciousness, you are in one point, and everything exists in relation to that point of consciousness. But now, the point is no longer there! So things exist in themselves. . . My consciousness is within things; it isn’t something that “receives.” (17 November 1971)


One could hardly wish for a better description of what Jean Gebser  has called the “aperspectival consciousness”. This decentralized consciousness, the Mother insisted, was not a “higher” consciousness superposed on the mind and the submental levels: it was the consciousness of the body.

- Now the body has the experience, and it’s much more real. The intellectual attitude puts something unreal over our perception of things. . . whereas the body feels it in itself, it BECOMES it. Instead of the experience being scaled down to the measure of the individual, the individual widens to the measure of the experience. (25 July 1970)


This experience of the body is above all characterized by oneness, by the abolition of all separation:

-Now the body feels it is within things or within people or within an action. There are no more limits. . . Before, each thing was separate, divided, unconnected with others, and very superficial. . . It doesn’t feel like that anymore. It mainly gives a feeling of intimacy, that is to say, there is no distance, no difference, no “something which sees” and “something which is seen” . . . And it always gives the impression of something without conflicts, without shocks, without complications, as if it were no longer possible to bump into anything. (18 July 1962 and 31 August 1963)


- It’s the difference between a vibratory movement circulating within an identical field of action, and a movement from an outside source, touching you and getting a reaction. (12 January 1962)


In the following passage the Mother alludes to an even more tantalizing aspect of oneness.

- When I speak of oneness. . . I don’t merely mean having the “sense” that all is one and that everything takes place within that One. What I mean by Oneness is that you can’t distinguish between conceiving the action, the will to act, the action itself, and the result. . . All is one, simultaneous. But how? It can’t be explained — it simply can’t! You can get a glimpse of the experience, but. . . ultimately, it’s inexpressible. . . At their maximum, at the height of their possibilities, human conceptions can express something or other of the overmind. (6 October 1962)


Evidently, the supermind has little respect for the mind’s categories. It even abrogates causality.

- Our habitual state of consciousness is to do something FOR something. . . There used to be a kind of mainspring, which had its raison d’être and so persisted: do this to arrive at that, and this leads to that (it’s more subtle, of course); but this mainspring suddenly seems to have been abolished. Now a kind of absoluteness prevails at each and every second, in each movement, from the most subtle, the most spiritual, to the most material. The sense of linking has disappeared: that isn’t the ’cause’ of this, and this isn’t done ’for’ that; there is no ‘there’ one is heading towards — it all seems. . . an absolute — innumerable, perpetual and simultaneous. The sense of connection has gone, the sense of cause and effect has gone — all that belongs to the world of space and time. (25 April 1961)


- I have a feeling that to have access to the highest and purest power, the very notion of “result” must disappear completely — the Supreme Power has no sense of result at all. . . The idea of something behind or ahead in time and so on is. . . it’s rather a Truth changing from immutable Eternity into Eternity of manifestation. (31 August 1962)


Here the Mother touches on the atemporal aspect of the supermind. Supramental causality, if the word may still be used, does not connect events or conditions in time; it links timelessness to time. As all time is seen from the ever-present Origin, simultaneously, so all action proceeds out of it. The spatio-temporal nexus of causes and results is no longer needed: each second, therefore, has its own eternity and its own law, which is a law of absolute truth, as the Mother once said. (10 May 1958) "

(https://antimatters2.files.wordpress.com/2018/04/2-1-9-16.pdf)