MIND
‘‘Mind’’ in the ordinary use of the word covers
indiscriminately the whole consciousness, for man is a mental being and mentalises
everything; but in the language of this yoga the words ‘‘mind’’ and ‘‘mental’’ are used to connote specially the
part of the nature which has to do with cognition and intelligence, with ideas, with mental or thought perceptions,
the reactions of thought to things, with the truly mental movements and formations, mental vision and will, etc.,
that are part of his intelligence.
Mind indeed can never be a perfect instrument of the Spirit; a supreme self-expression is not possible in its movements because to separate, divide, limit is its very character. Even if mind could be free from all positive falsehood and error, even if it could be all intuitive and infallibly intuitive, it could still present and organise only half-truths or separate truths and these too not in their own body but in luminous representative figures put together to make an accumulated total or a massed structure. Therefore the self-perfecting mental being here must either depart into pure spirit by the shedding of its lower existence or return upon the physical life to develop in it a capacity not yet found in our mental and psychic nature.
If you follow your mind, it will not recognise the Mother even when she is manifested before you. Follow your soul and not your mind, your soul that answers to the Truth, not your mind that leaps at appearances.
For Mind is Maya, sat-asat: there is a field of embrace of the true and the false, the existent and the non-existent, and it is in that ambiguous field that Mind seems to reign; but even in its own reign it is in truth a diminished consciousness, it is not part of the original and supremely originating power of the Eternal. Even if Mind is able to reflect some image of essential Truth in its substance, yet the dynamic force and action of Truth appears in it always broken and divided. All Mind can do is to piece together the fragments or deduce a unity; truth of Mind is only a half-truth or a portion of a puzzle. Mental knowledge is always relative, partial and inconclusive, and its outgoing action and creation come out still more confused in its steps or precise only in narrow limits and by imperfect piecings together.
Mind is the author, spectator, actor, stage:
Mind only is and what it thinks is seen.
If Mind is all, renounce the hope of bliss;
If Mind is all, renounce the hope of Truth.
For Mind can never touch the body of Truth
And Mind can never see the soul of God.
