SENSE MIND
Manas, the sense mind, depends in our ordinary consciousness on the physical
organs of receptive sense for 
knowledge
and on the organs of the body for action directed towards the objects of sense. The superficial and outward action
of the senses is physical and nervous in its character, and they may easily be thought to be merely results of
nerve-action; they are sometimes called in the old books pranas, nervous or life activities. But still the essential
thing in them is not the nervous excitation, but the consciousness, the action of the chitta, which makes use of
the organ and of the nervous impact of which it is he channel. Manas, sense-mind, is the activity, emerging
from the basic consciousness, which makes up the whole essentiality of what we call sense. Sight, hearing, taste,
smell, touch are really properties of the mind, not of the body.
The plane we inhabit is the plane of Matter; the present predominant principle
in our nature is the mental intelligence with the sense-mind, which depends upon Matter, as its support and pedestal.
As a consequence, the preoccupation of the mental intelligence and its powers with the material existence as it
is shown to it through the senses, and with life as it has been formulated in a compromise between life and matter,
is a special stamp of the constitutional Ignorance.
The proper function of the sense-mind is to lie open passively, luminously to
the contacts of Life and transmit their sensations and the rasa or right taste and principle of delight
in them to the higher function; but interfered with by the attractions and repulsions, the acceptances and refusals,
the satisfactions and dissatisfactions, the capacities and incapacities of the life-energy in the body it is, to
begin with, limited in its scope and, secondly, forced in these limits to associate itself with all these discords
of the life in Matter. It becomes an instrument for pleasure and pain instead of for delight of existence.
Truth proceeds by a correction of the values our mind and senses give us, and
first by the action of a higher intelligence that enlightens and sets right as far as may be the conclsions of
the ignorant sense-mind and limited physical intelligence; that is the method of all human knowledge and science.
But beyond it there is a knowledge, a Truth-consciousness, that exceeds our intellect and brings us into the true
light of which it is a refracted ray.
They worked for the body's wants, they craved no more,
Content to breathe, to feel, to sense, to act,
Identified with the spirit's outer shell.
