Selection from The life Divine

From the chapter, "Ascent and Integration", pp. 717- 720

"In mind itself there are ... successive elevations which we may
conveniently call planes and sub-planes of the mental consciousness and
the mental being. The development of our mental self is largely an
ascent of this stair; we can take our stand on any one of them, while
yet maintaining a dependence on the lower stages and a power of
occasional ascension to higher levels or of a response to influences
from our being's superior strata. At present we still normally take our
first secure stand on the lowest sub-plane of the intelligence, which we
may call the physical-mental, because it depends for its evidence of
fact and sense of reality on the physical brain, the physical
sense-mind, the physical sense-organs; there we are the physical man who
attaches most importance to objective things and to his outer life, has
little intensity of the subjective or inner existence and subordinate
whatever he has of it to the greater claims of exterior reality. The
physical man has a vital part, but it is mainly made up of the smaller
instinctive and impulsive formations of life-consciousness emerging from
the subconscient, along with a customary crowd or round of sensations,
desires, hopes, feelings satisfactions which are dependent on external
things and external contacts and concerned with the practical, the
immediately realizable and possible, the habitual, the common and
average. He has a mental part, but this too is customary, traditional,
practical, objective, and respects what belongs to the domain of mind
mostly for its utility for the support, comfort, use, satisfaction and
entertainment of his physical and sensational existence for the physical
mind takes its stand on matter and the material world, on the body and
the bodily life, on sense-experience and on a normal practical mentality
and its experience. All that is not of this order, the physical mind
builds up as a restricted superstructure dependent upon the external
sense-mentality. Even so, it regards these higher contents of life as
either helpful adjuncts or a superfluous but pleasant luxury of
imaginations, feelings and thought-abstractions, not as inner realities;
or, even if it receives them as realities, it does not feel them
concretely and substantially in their own proper substance, subtler than
the physical substance and its grosser concreteness, - it treats them as
a subjective, less substantial extension from physical realities. It is
inevitable that the human being should thus take his first stand on
matter and give the external fact and external existence its due
importance; for this is nature's first provision for our existence, on
which she insists greatly: the physical man is emphasized in us and is
multiplied abundantly in the world by her as her force for conservation
of the secure, if somewhat inert, material basis on which she can
maintain herself while she attempts her higher human developments; but
in this mental formation there is no power for progress or only for a
material progress. It is our first mental status, but the mental being
cannot remain always at this lowest rung of the human evolutionary
ladder.

"Above physical mind and deeper within than physical sensation,
there is what we may call an intelligence of the life-mind, dynamic,
vital, nervous, more open, though still obscurely, to the psychic,
capable of a first soul-formation, though only of an obscurer life-soul,
- not the psychic being, but a frontal formation of the vital Purusha,.
This life-soul concretely senses and contacts the things of the
life-world, and tries to realize them here; it attaches immense
importance to the satisfaction and fulfillment of the life-being, the
life-force, the vital nature: it looks on physical existence as a field
for the life-impulses' self-fulfilment, for the play of ambition, power,
strong character, love, passion, adventure, for the individual, the
collective, the general human seeking and hazard and venture, for all
kinds of life-experiment and new life-experience, and but for this
saving element, this greater power, interest, significance, the physical
existence would have for it no value. This life-mentality is supported
by our secret subliminal vital being and is in veiled contact with a
life-world to which it can easily open and so feel the unseen dynamic
forces and realities behind the material universe. There is an inner
life-mind which does not need for its perceptions the evidence of the
physical senses, is not limited by them; for on this level our inner
life and the inner life of the world become real to us independent of
the body and of the symbols of the physical world which alone we call
natural phenomena, as if Nature had no greater phenomena and no greater
realities than those of gross Matter. The vital man, molded consciously
or unconsciously by these influences, is the man of desire and
sensation, the man of force and action, the man of passion and emotion,
the kinetic individual: he may and does lay great stress on the material
existence, but he gives it, even when most preoccupied with its present
actualities, a push for life-experience, for force of realization, for
life-extension, for life- power, for life-affirmation and life-expansion
which is Nature's first impetus towards enlargement of the being; at a
highest intensity of this life-impetus, he becomes the breaker of bonds,
the seeker of new horizons, the disturber of the past and present in the
interest of the future. He has a mental life which is often enslaved to
the vital force and its desires and passions, and it is these he seeks
to satisfy through the mind: but when he interests himself strongly in
mental things, he can become the mental adventurer, the opener of the
way to new mind-formations or the fighter for an idea, the sensitive
type of artist, the dynamic poet f life or the prophet or champion of a
cause. The vital mind is kinetic and therefore a great force in the
working of evolutionary Nature.

"Above this level of vital mentality and yet more inly extended,
is a mind-plane of pure thought and intelligence to which the things of
the mental world are the most important realities; those who are under
its influence, the philosopher, thinker, scientist, intellectual
creator, the man of the idea, the man of the written or spoken word, he
idealist and dreamer are the present mental being at his highest
attained summit. This mental man has his life-part, his life of
passions and desires and ambitions and life-hopes of all kinds and his
lower sensational and physical existence, and this lower part can often
equibalance or weigh down his nobler mental element so that, although it
is the highest portion of him, it does not become dominant and formative
in his whole nature: but this is not typical of him in his greatest
development, for there the vital and physical are controlled and
subjected by the thinking will and intelligence. The mental man cannot
transform his nature, but he can control and harmonize it and lay on it
the law of a mental ideal, impose a balance or a sublimating and
refining influence, and give a high consistency to the multipersonal
confusion and conflict or the summary patchwork of our divided and half-
constructed being. He can be the observer and governor of his own mind
and life, can consciously develop them and become to that extent a
self-creator.

"This mind of pure intelligence has behind it our inner or
subliminal mind which senses directly all the things of the mind-plane,
is open to the action of a world of mental forces, and can feel the
ideative and other imponderable influences which act upon the material
world and the life- plane but which at present we can only infer and
cannot directly experience: these intangibles and imponderables are to
the mental man real and patent and he regards them as truths demanding
to be realized in our or the earth's nature. On the inner plane mind
and mind-soul independent of the body can become to us an entire
reality, and we can consciously live in them as much as in the body.
Thus to live in mind and the things of the mind, to be an intelligence
rather than a life and a body, is our highest position, short of
spirituality, in the degrees of Nature. The mental man, the man of a
self-dominating and self-formative mind and will conscious of an ideal
and turned towards its realization, the high intellect, the thinker, the
sage, less kinetic and immediately effective than the vital man, who is
the man of action and outer swift life-fulfilment, but as powerful and
eventually even more powerful to open new vistas tot he race, is the
normal summit of Nature's evolutionary formation on the human plane.
These three degrees of mentality, clear in themselves, but most often
mixed in our composition, are to our ordinary intelligence only
psychological types that happen to have developed, and we do not
discover any other significance in them; but in fact they are full of
significance, for they are the steps of nature's evolution of mental
being towards its self-exceeding, and, as thinking mind is the highest
step she can now attain, the perfected mental man is the rarest and
highest of her normal human creatures. To go farther she has to bring
into the mind and make active in mind, life and body the spiritual
principle.