How do we know? — IV

Matthijs Cornelissen
last revision: 07 October 2024

perfecting one's inner instruments of knowledge

Sources of error

Over the long history of India’s thinking about these issues, many different descriptions of our human difficulties with arriving at reliable knowledge have been given, but ignorance, desire and ego are perhaps mentioned most often as the chief culprits. As we will see, the idea of a still ongoing evolution of consciousness we gave in one of the earlier chapters suggests a subtly different way of dealing with these three, but before we get to that, it will be good to have a look at how they are more generally understood.

Ignorance
Ignorance, avidya, has a very specific meaning in the Indian knowledge systems. It is not just a little gap in the collection of ordinary knowledge we have created for ourselves about the world around us. It can perhaps best be described as a lack of awareness of the essential oneness of our individual self with the Being, Consciousness and Joy of the Divine. As a result it cannot be resolved by collecting a bit of missing information. Overcoming this ignorance requires the realisation of that Oneness, in other words, an existential change in our sense of self, of who we are, of what the world is, of God, of, literally, everything.

The problems with desire and ego are similar to the one with Ignorance, but overcoming the ignorance is not fully sufficient to overcome the other two. The reason is that they belong to different parts of our being.

Desire
Desire stands in this context for a whole group of drives like fear, anger, etc. which are all part of our vital nature, of the life-force in us. As long as we identify as small, semi-independent creatures in a not always friendly socio-physical world, we need them to get us into action and protect us from danger. And yet, if we grow out of that smallness, out of that ignorance, we don't need them anymore. It is an error to think that there will be no action without desire and discontent: the whole pre-biological world hums along fine without them and so can post-biological life.

Ego
There are similar issues with the ego. In mainstream psychology, a strong, capable ego is widely accepted as an essential part of human existence, and there are, indeed, stages in life, when assertions like ‘I like this and not that’, ‘I’m me and not you’, ‘I believe this and not that’ are needed in order to separate our own individual identity out from our surrounding world. Interestingly, in most people the ego doesn't develop gradually but in distinct stages. When children are nearing three, they tend to assert their own identity as distinct from that of their parents and immediate caregivers.1 During puberty the issue of identity arises again in the much more complex transition from life as child in a small family and neighbourhood circle to life as an adult in a much larger society, and, for some, it happens once again in the form of a "mid-life crises" when it is time to take stock of the social identity one has drifted into only half-consciously. Who we are is important to us and there is a massive literature about this issue. The problem is that we humans don't seem to have a single fixed identity. A rock is a rock is a rock, but our human identity shifts from moment to moment. One moment we identify with one group of thoughts, another with another, a third with our feelings, one specific part of our body, our social position, our possessions, the group "we belong to". What we identify with seems to be determined from moment to moment by an immensely complex interaction between different aspects of our character and whatever circumstances happen to come our way. It is from this confused instability that there arises the need to construct an ego, a to some extent artificial pseudo-identity that can serve as the more or less satisfactory and semi-stable centre of our existence and our actions. But since it is an artificial construct, it is vulnerable and in constant need of defence.2

Fortunately, as the Indian and many other ancient traditions discovered, we need not remain the hapless protagonist of an absurd and ultimately vain attempt at keeping the ego standing. When one goes deep enough, one realises one's immortality which is not in conflict with that of others or the larger, underlying oneness, so we need no longer defend our separate existence, and we can afford to see reality with less and less of ego-centric bias, more and more as it is. At that stage an ego-centric defence becomes the effective cause both of our suffering and of our inability to see reality as it is. Accordingly, in spiritual literature, ego and desire are mentioned more often as factors leading to unhappiness, ignorance and distorted knowledge, while the factor most commonly indicated as leading to bliss and unbiased knowledge is perfect detachment.

Ignorance from the perspective of an ongoing evolution of consciousness.

Sri Aurobindo offers a slightly different but eminently practical perspective on the basic defects of the ordinary human mind in two interesting passages of The Synthesis of Yoga. He describes them there as immixture and improper functioning. Both can best be understood in the context of Sri Aurobindo’s vision of an ongoing evolution of consciousness which we discussed earlier.3 Within this framework of a gradually evolving consciousness, he sees these two basic defects of the mind as due to the stickiness of our evolutionary past.

Immixture
Immixture happens when an earlier and more primitive form of consciousness interferes in a higher and later form. A typical example occurs when two people discuss a theoretical question. Their minds are genuinely interested in finding out what is true, because the quest for truth is part of the basic dharma of the mind. But when the vital part of their natures interferes, things go haywire. The vital part of human nature is not concerned with truth. As long as a deeper Love does not take over, the natural tendency of the life-force, which we have inherited from the animal stage of evolution, is survival, self-assertion, possession. So when the vital part of the nature enters into the debate, the stress is no longer on finding out what is true, but on who will win the argument. If the vital part of our nature is sufficiently purified, it will obey the mind and enjoy whatever it offers — a pure vital nature will be happy if a more perfect knowledge has been found irrespective of who has won the argument. But if an unregenerate part of the vital nature dominates over the mind, it will insist on its own winning, even to the extent of tempting the mind to bring in false arguments.4

Improper functioning
In harmony with the idealist nature of his Vedic philosophy, Sri Aurobindo holds that for each part of our nature there are ideal or proper ways of functioning, as well as improper ways. For the vital nature the proper functioning includes an equal, glad enjoyment of whatever happens. The mixture of happiness, pain and indifference, of desires and fears from which most of us suffer, is the result of the gradual and as of now only partially completed evolution of the vital nature out of the totally involved nescience of matter. Similarly the ideal function of the mind is to receive in a complete passivity the knowledge that sustains the world and to express it in the physical life-form it inhabits. What the unregenerate mind does instead, again due to remnants of its slow emergence out of the stupor of matter and the ignorance of the life in which it grows up, is to strive after knowledge and construct it in an ever more complicated, but never fully satisfactory confusion.

The purification of the mind itself

The result of these two defects is the ‘noisiness’ of the ordinary mind. Fine physical measurements demand a vibration-free room, and the same is true in psychology. A perfect joy can only be received in a heart that is wide, calm, and completely free of desire and attachment. Perfect knowledge can only be received in a wide and calm mind that is completely free of mental preferences and distortions. Inner silence is crucial to know the deepest layers of one’s being, and the deeper one tries to enter into the recesses of one’s inner nature, the more imperative becomes the need for a complete silence of the observing consciousness. To silence the mind is of such importance that Patañjali describes it as nothing less than the central objective of yoga and Sri Aurobindo describes it sometimes as an essential step for deeper knowledge and sometimes as the ultimate essence itself.5

Most people who try to silence their mind, soon realize that they have little control over their thoughts and that thoughts seem to come and go on their own. When one looks more closely, one sees that the vast majority of these mechanical thoughts that go on ruminating in one’s mind are triggered by sense-impressions, and that they draw their energy from often trivial physical and social needs and desires. The latter issue we have already discussed: an absolute prior condition for silencing the mind is to avoid what Sri Aurobindo calls immixture of the unregenerate vital in the mind’s workings. The necessity to overcome desires is mentioned in practically all spiritual traditions and is directly related to the two defects of immixture and improper functioning we just mentioned. As we saw, desire is itself a deformation of the vital’s true nature, and its interference in the mind’s workings is the main obstacle to direct and unbiased insight. The most obvious way to achieve silence in the mind is thus either to isolate the mind from the vital part of the nature, or, for a more lasting result, to quieten and purify the vital nature itself. Freeing the mind from negative vital influences is, however, not sufficient as the mind itself has its own defects. Sri Aurobindo mentions three conditions that need to be met if we want to overcome these defects and arrive at deeper and more reliable inner knowledge:

Freedom from the senses.
In itself there is, of course, nothing wrong with the senses; they play a crucial role in almost everything we do. The problem consists of our lack of inner freedom and too limited mastery. When we read a book, we do not hear the street noise, but when there is no obvious focus of attention to keep the mind engaged, a tiny sound can set off a useless train of customary, and entirely trivial thoughts. What we need is to receive the input, be free to ignore it or take heed, and then remain open to what follows. Interestingly, there is hardly any relation between the quality and quantity of the input and the value of what follows from it. A sunrise can tell us that it is time for breakfast, trigger a life-changing experience of the divine Presence in nature, or evoke a sudden insight in the way the earth and the planets move around the sun and their own axis. What is more, the sensitivity for the extra can be developed. It is quite common, for example, that people sense the Sacred in the beauty of nature, whether pristine or carefully tended, but one can learn to feel the Sacred even in what earlier appeared as mundane or ugly.

Freedom from the past and future.
The second defect of the mind is that it is too anxious. This form of improper functioning is in essence the same as the main defect in the vital. The vital part of our nature is too anxious to be happy, and as a consequence it loses its inherent peace and joy and gets instead lost in a jumble of desires and fears. When the mind is too anxious it first grabs intuitions and sense-impressions too eagerly, then builds all kind of unwarranted extrapolations on top of them, and finally it sticks too tenaciously to the little it has found. To continue to grow in knowledge with the help of intuition, one should always remain quiet, accept what comes, and yet remain open to what might come next . The solution is thus the same as for the immixture and the clinging to the senses: one should retain a perfect equanimity, detachment and a vast inner calm.

The ability to silence one's mind.
There are several methods to silence the mind. The easiest, most commonly advocated but perhaps not the fastest method, is to let the mind run its own course but to withdraw one’s interest and sanction. If one manages to consistently refuse engagement in the thoughts that pass through one’s mind, they slowly die out. The stress, however, is on the ‘if’, and on the ‘slowly’. The second method is to enter with the centre of one’s consciousness into a realm of silence that pre-exists in an inner space deep within the heart or well above the mind.6 The third is to call this same pre-existent silence down into one’s mind, heart and even body. The fourth is probably the most efficient, but also the most strenuous. Here one distances oneself again completely from what goes on in one’s mind, and then one stays on guard and systematically throws out every thought as soon as it enters into one’s awareness. This is effective but it requires the ability to centre oneself in or at least near one’s mental puruṣa, one’s real, innermost Self on the level of the mind, and yet remain active. This is not easy, and after this, one has still to prefect one's inner and outer nature to a considerable degree before one can express the inner knowledge that can arise from there reliably.

Endnotes