Thoughts and Aphorisms 16

16. Do not, like so many modern disputants, smother thought under polysyllables or charm inquiry to sleep by the spell of formulas and cant words.
Search always; find out the reason for things which seem to the hasty glance to be mere chance or illusion.
[Sri Aurobindo: Thoughts and Aphorisms]

Many intellectuals, in the present days of Philosophy and Science and thinking, have covered thought within one or two or a few words, consisting a few syllables. And the covering has been such that it suppressed and throttled thought so as to stop its further progress towards the real Discovery of Truth.

And they have also mesmerized enquiry into sleep by using some formulæ or a few words. So, thought is silenced and enquiry is stopped. Questioned in the mind are lulled. A real and complete search, a deep and genuine seeking, is not there: only, there are half-seeking, with easy-going and stop-gap arrangements.

Whatever seems to us to be chance or illusion, whatever we patent or name as chance or illusion, may not be really so. There must be some reason behind their existence. There must be some meaning of whatever we label as chance or illusion.

The Mother has said, while interpreting Sri Aurobindo, that the mind has several levels or zones or regions from the ordinary physical mind to the higher mind, which receives the rays of the Supramental Light in the form of intuitions. One of these regions is the mind that uses ‘practical reason’ which termed otherwise as commonsense.

Often the mind of practical reason or commonsense inconclusively concludes some mental searches or enquiries or discussions and labels them with some ‘polysyllables,’ as stated by Sri Aurobindo.

The Mother puts it beautifully:
“To this region of practical reason belong the ‘polysyllables’ of which Sri Aurobindo speaks, the commonplaces or clichés, all the readymade phrases which run about in the mental atmosphere from one brain to another and which people repeat when they want to appear knowledgeable, or when they think themselves wise.”

Words such as illusion, hallucination or chance are examples of such polysyllables. Some phenomena which cannot be explained or understood are referred to as illusions or hallucinations or chances. There, at that level or region of mind, further search or enquiry is stopped, for the phenomena concerned are explained away. For, the human consciousness at its present general level is partial and superficial and confined by man himself to the gross limits of the physical mind.

That is the reason why Sri Aurobindo has said: “Search always”. We should continue the enquiry, continue to find out the real answers to our questions, the inner questions. According to Sri Aurobindo, the World is real. If it appears to us to be unreal or an illusion or a falsehood, it is then the lack of a true search and a true realization. The search must go on, till we find the One by which all live and exist:

A pure existence safe from thought and mood,
A consciousness of unshared immortal bliss,
It dwelt aloof in its bare infinite,
One and unique, unutterably sole.
A Being formless, featureless and mute
That knew itself by its own timeless self,
Aware for ever in its motionless depths,
Uncreating, uncreated and unborn,
The One by whom all live, who lives by none,
An immeasurable luminous secrecy
Guarded by the veils of the Unmanifest,
Above the changing cosmic interlude
Abode supreme, immutably the same,
A silent Cause occult, impenetrable,--
Infinite, eternal, unthinkable, alone.

[Savitri, Book Two, Canto One]

Barindranath Chaki
08-09-2009

[Simultaneously published in Sulekha, All choice and ASPIRATION.]

Barindranath Chaki
08-09-2009