Introduction

Several years ago I stumbled across Sri Aurobindo’s concept of the Supermind and evolution of consciousness. At the time I was impressed by how closely these ideas mapped to my understanding of Rudolf Steiner’s own thinking, but never dug any deeper. Now several years later a series of events has conspired in a beautiful way to make me want to revisit this topic.

One of the first challenges on this path was very familiar. It is the same one that anybody wishing to penetrate into the 6000 conferences, 40+ books, magazine articles, unpublished/ untranslated material written by Steiner, as well as all the secondary literature, faces. Where do I start? Aurobindo also has a complete works, like Steiner, which is abbreviated to CWSA. This runs to 36 volumes (22000+ pages) plus a further 17 volumes which go by the name of The Mother.

Goethe

I started searching for a way into this vast body of learning and lo, I did find. I was directed to part 2, chapter 25 of Aurobindo’s “The Life Divine” and there right at the beginning of the chapter I realized I was in familiar spiritual science territory. Immediately I recognized the Goethean quality of this introduction by Aurobindo to the idea of the triple transformation. In Faust part 2 within the “Walpurgnis Night’s Dream” Goethe presents us with a vision of nature whereby humanity was created by nature herself so that she may become aware of herself and participate in her own continuous self-discovery and growth. Whilst studying plants and developing his insights into the morphology and transformation of plants he recognized the organizing principle underlying the whole plant kingdom. Consequently Goethe felt fully justified in viewing humanity as a product of a higher organizing principle in nature that strived towards a conscious connection with her.

If it is the sole intention of Nature in the evolution of the spiritual man to awaken him to the supreme Reality and release him from herself, or from the Ignorance in which she as the Power of the Eternal has masked herself, by a departure into a higher status of being elsewhere, if this step in the evolution is a close and an exit, then in the essence her work has been already accomplished and there is nothing more to be done. (Triple Transformation ch 25)

I will have cause to return to this triple transformation, but to understand chapter 25 it became important for me to understand the foundation on which this enlivening idea was secured. Without knowing the foundations on which an idea is built we have no way of knowing if the idea is merely an idle invention of a creative mind or an invention of the mind firmly grounded in reality. This led me to part 2, chapter 7 “The Knowledge and the Ignorance”. It is this chapter that I want to investigate more thoroughly here, because as I read those 18 pages I felt that I was reading some of the essential aspects of the first half of Steiner’s “The Philosophy of Freedom”. Multiple times I was struck by how Aurobindo, whilst coming from a completely different tradition, was making similar essential points to Steiner on the relationship of thinking to knowing. Many of the same piercing insights were expressed using a completely different language, yet because they were conceptually identical the language was no longer a barrier to understanding. It was a Pentecostal experience, where language was no longer a barrier. Now I will try to recommunicate this union.

You can find The Life Divine here:
https://motherandsriaurobindo.in/Sri-Aurobindo/books/the-life-divine/

The format will be simple. I will select texts in the same order as the original text and describe how they coincide with ideas explicitly stated or implicitly understood from a deeper reading of Steiner’s Philosophy of Freedom.

Supermind

In our scrutiny of the seven principles of existence it was found that they are one in their essential and fundamental reality: for if even the matter of the most material universe is nothing but a status of being of Spirit made an object of sense, envisaged by the Spirit’s own consciousness as the stuff of its forms, much more must the life-force that constitutes itself into form of Matter, and the mind-consciousness that throws itself out as Life, and the Supermind that develops Mind as one of its powers, be nothing but Spirit itself modified in apparent substance and in dynamism of action, not modified in real essence

Here I will focus specifically on the “Supermind that develops Mind as one of its powers”. I have elsewhere (waywithwords.se) looked more deeply into the exceptional state, so will here briefly summarize so that the connection may be ascertained.

In the exceptional state the focus of our attention is on that activity that makes thinking possible. The content of thinking itself is no longer of interest, instead an attempt is made to contemplate without words and images, formlessly, this activity that in normal waking consciousness connects us to the world of the senses in the outward direction and also towards the inner world of our mental images, memories, feelings. In chapter 4 of PoF we arrive at the insight that the subject does not think because it is a subject; rather it appears to itself as a subject because it can think ……[it is] neither subjective nor objective, [but]transcends both these concepts …..[thus] my individual subject lives by the grace of thinking. Steiner refers to this non-subjective activity as the “universal activity of thinking”.

What is interesting in this context is that the relationship that Aurobindo describes between the Supermind and the Mind has the same essential dynamic that Steiner describes as existing between the Universal Activity of Thinking (UAT) and how this UAT is experienced in the individual subject. When we shine a bright light into a dark room, it illuminates the contents of that room. However, we would never see that light if there weren’t objects in that room which could reflect the illuminating activity of light. As we direct our attention to the objects of the room, mental pictures, we lose sight of the activity of light making this attention possible. The world of the senses, inner and outer, would forever remain dark to knowing were the light of thinking not able to alight on the contents of consciousness. Steiner summarizes this essential relationship revealed in the exceptional state by stating:

A firm point has now been reached from which one can, with some hope of success, seek an explanation of all other phenomena of the world (chapter 3) .

Expressing this in an alternative way, we can say that no knowledge of the world and my being is possible without thinking. It can be experienced without thinking, yet as soon as I try to make any statement about the world or my being, then the light of thinking must alight in the place of the skull. Consequently, it seems justified to equate the relationship between Aurobindo’s Supermind to the Mind with how Steiner describes the relationship between the UAT and mental pictures and memories. Using Aurobindo’s word the spirit is apparently modified in substance, but not in real essence.

Ignorance

But here there is a world based upon an original Inconscience; here consciousness has formulated itself in the figure of an ignorance labouring towards knowledge. We have seen that there is no essential reason either in the nature of Being itself or in the original character and fundamental relations of its seven principles for this intrusion of Ignorance, of discord into the harmony, of darkness into the light, of division and limitation into the self-conscious infinity of the divine creation.

In the image of “ignorance labouring towards knowledge” a reader of the Philosophy of Freedom can instinctively feel drawn to a comparison with Steiner discussion of the “relationless aggregate” or “the given” as discussed in. In chapter 4 Steiner describes the life of a being untouched by the light of thinking.

The world would then appear to this being as nothing but a mere disconnected aggregate of objects of sensation: colours, sounds, sensations of pressure, of warmth, of taste and smell; also feelings of pleasure and pain. This aggregate is the content of pure, unthinking observation. Over against it stands thinking, ready to begin its activity as soon as a point of attack presents itself.

The concept of the given is critical for gaining a deeper understanding the true relationship between thinking and that which is given prior to thinking. In the PoF we are reminded that the given is already permeated by concepts that govern the given. This simple truth is demonstrated in recognizing that Newton didn’t invent the concept of gravity that determines an aspect of the relationship between all objects. The concept already existed and apples were falling off trees long before Newton’s time. What was new was that a new level of conceptual clarity was achieved as to the relationship between the mass of a body and its weight as determined the gravitational field it exists in. Newton increased awareness, lessening of ignorance, was granted him by the activity of thinking.

Ignorance is a human problem, not nature’s problem. The concept we call gravity acts in nature and it is of no consequence to her whether the human knows of it or not. When we meet the inner and outer world we are continually presented with a given, that is to say something which we ourselves did not bring into existence.  Initially the human being is ignorant of these concepts. However, that which appears to simply exist without conceptual insight can by degrees cause the activity of thinking to illuminate in us a new concept which allows us to understand or know the world. In the PoF the step by step overcoming of ignorance is, at it at its core, the recognition of how a concept created in my consciousness is linked to phenomena not created by my own activity. My human psycho-spiritual nature is initially blind to the full reality of concept and percept. As I develop my conceptual life I use this to overcome my ignorance of the world. Thus I continue labouring out of ignorance into increasing knowledge.

The above understanding is further confirmed when Aurobindo states:

This selfbuilding they figured as the creation by man in himself of that other world or high ordered harmony of infinite being which already exists perfect and eternal in the Divine Infinite. The lower is for us the first condition of the higher; the darkness is the dense body of the light, the Inconscient guards in itself all the concealed Superconscient, the powers of the division and falsehood hold from us but also for us and to be conquered from them the riches and substance of the unity and the truth in their cave of subconscience.

Truth hidden by a Truth

The Vedic seers were conscious of such a divine self-manifestation and looked on it as the greater world beyond this lesser, a freer and wider plane of consciousness and being, the truth-creation of the Creator which they described as the seat or own home of the Truth, as the vast Truth, or the Truth, the Right, the Vast, again as a Truth hidden by a Truth where the Sun of Knowledge finishes his journey and unyokes his horses, where the thousand rays of consciousness stand together so that there is That One, the supreme form of the Divine Being.

The key focus for this part of the analysis is linking another key aspect of PoF to the beautifully enigmatic “truth hidden by a truth”. A thousand rays of consciousness meeting in the supreme from of the Divine Being is not image readily understood by a mind versed in a mechanical atomistic world picture. The modern experience of thinking, at a superficial level, must reject such imagery as being fantastical and not rooted in reality. However, by yet again delving into the exceptional state and thinking about thinking itself we begin to experience how thinking is a deeply mysterious activity. In chapter 3 & 4 of PoF Steiner develops the relationship of the mental picture to that of knowing the world and the activity of thinking. We are told in PoF that:

The failure to recognize the true relationship between mental picture and object has led to the greatest misunderstandings in modern philosophy.

This failure is multifaceted and here I will endeavour to highlight one specific aspect in relation to Aurobindo’s observations derived from the Vidya / Avidya  framework. In the PoF we find that knowledge of the world is achieved by connecting concepts created in individual consciousness with percepts created in the world , yet also appearing in consciousness. When I see and recognize something, eg.  a triangle, in the world I am performing this simple cognitive action. However, when I see a triangle I am not seeing the concept itself, I am only seeing one of an infinite number of possible triangles which all conform to the geometrical definition, a form having 3 sides, 3 angles which add up to 180 degrees.  I can only recognize a triangle as being a triangle in the outer world if already have the concept of triangle. However, I am not restricted to merely identifying triangles in the world of the senses. As a thinking being I am also capable of recalling the percept together with the concept. This image that I create in my inner being is my own mental image (individualized concept chapter 6). It is, as it were, my own personal experience of the truth of what a triangle is, yet at the same time it is not the full truth of what a triangle is. Steiner expresses the same idea when he states at the beginning of chapter 4:

Through thinking, concepts and ideas arise. What a concept is cannot be expressed in words. Words can do no more than draw our attention to the fact that we have concepts. When someone sees a tree, his thinking reacts to his observation, an ideal element is added to the object, and he considers the object and the ideal counterpart as belonging together. When the object disappears from his field of observation, only the ideal counterpart of it remains.

In normal everyday thinking we do not observe how the conceptual world is born in us in a moment of intuition. Everyday thinking uses mental pictures to represent reality and these do a fine job of helping us to make sense of world around us. However, these useful truths at the same time are hiding a bigger, grander truth because as long as we make mental pictures the content of our consciousness, we are also masking the void out of which they are born. The activity that creates these concepts, which enable us to recognize them in the world of perception is a realm into which at a normal level of consciousness, that which Aurobindo calls Mind, we cannot penetrate. However, we will see that this apparent limit to knowing, which Kant takes to be absolute, is transcended in both Aurobindo’s and Steiner’s theory of knowledge. Consciousness can evolve and will evolve in people capable of living in a thinking relationship to this basic insight into how we know the world. It is through the re-uniting of the individualized concepts created by the intellectual faculty that we can re-create the whole from which our psycho-spiritual organization tore us. As we proceed carefully along this path there will arise a point where a thousand rays of consciousness uniting in a supreme being can become a meaningful image for us to describe the true significance of how lots of small truths can hide the one great truth. We will also be able to recognize the same idea when Aurobindo states:

The lower is for us the first condition of the higher; the darkness is the dense body of the light, the Inconscient guards in itself all the concealed Superconscient, the powers of the division and falsehood hold from us but also for us and to be conquered from them the riches and substance of the unity and the truth in their cave of subconscience.

The perils of mental pictures

We mentioned above that the failure to recognize the essential nature of the mental picture leads to much misunderstanding in philosophy.  Aurobindo’s describes how this leads to an essential dualism and the creation of an irreconcilable opposition.

All acceptations of our defeat or our limitation start from the implied or explicit recognition, first, of an essential dualism and, then, of an irreconcilable opposition between the dual principles, between the Conscient and the Inconscient, between Heaven and Earth, between God and the World,  between the limitless One and the limited Many, between the Knowledge and the Ignorance.

Let us now consider how Steiner treats the problems of dualism and false monisms. This is often one area of the book that causes much confusion for the casual reader. However, it is of vital importance for the whole science of freedom that the importance of this overcoming of dualism and false monisms is fully understood. When this is achieved we also see how Steiner and Aurobindo seem in complete agreement about the essential nature of reality and the relationship of the individual to the reality in which he lives.

This will be an extremely condensed summary of what is one of the central topics in the book. Steiner demonstrates how dualism divides the whole of existence into two sphere, each of which contains it own laws and at the same time standing in fundamental opposition because there is no bridge between the two realms. Specifically with relation to Kant he demonstrates how the Kantian dualism of perceptual object and thing-in-itself is rooted in an incorrect understanding of the relation of thinking to perception. Similar to Aurobindo, Steiner also demonstrates how a consistent and extreme dualism must conclude that knowledge is an illusion. He details this in his discussion of absolute illusionism and  Eduard von Hartmann’s transcendental realism. Schopenhauer is also taken to task for creating  metaphysical concepts that by definition are unknowable. He further elaborates how the 3 monisms of materialism and spiritualism or indissoluble binding of matter and spirit are equally not up to the job of reconciling in a meaningful way mankind’s spiritual nature with the natural world within which it lives. Steiner resolves the false monisms into a monism which is named Ethical Individualism. Like Aurobindo, this resolution is achieved by recognizing the correct relationship of the individual spirit life in the context of the previously mentioned Universal Activity of Thinking which appears from behind the scenes of everyday mental life.

It is worth pointing out at this point that Aurobindo is deriving all his insights based in the conceptual frameworks elaborated in the Upanishads and pre-Vedic thought, called Vidya and Avidya. Consequently these also represent the authority which Aurobindo uses to support his argument.  Steiner on the other hand in the PoF is appealing to the authority of the reader’s own experience of what thinking is and what it is not. What is remarkable is that both of them have conceptually identical ideas on the causes of the failure to understand the true nature of thinking despite start from apparently different starting points.

Ignorance

Aurobindo points out that certain thinkers consider the problem of the cause of ignorance as insoluble. For Aurobindo this problem is resolved in recognizing that the power of Brahman has the double force of Knowledge and Ignorance.

We must then seize hold on this strange power of Consciousness which is the root of our ills, examine the principle of its operation and detect not only its essential nature and origin, but its power and process of operation and its last end and means of removal. How is it that the Ignorance exists? How has any principle or power in the infinite self-awareness been able to put self-knowledge behind it and exclude all but its own characteristic limited action?

Steiner resolves this problem as we have already indicated by recognizing that it is our own psycho-spiritual natures that cause us to fail to understand both the inevitability of ignorance. Yet at the same time he identifies that force or being dwelling in or acting through us in the I as being the means by which ignorance can be overcome.

Both Steiner and Aurobindo resolve this in a way that confers meaning on to the process of overcoming ignorance. This is particularly significant as it also means a transcendence of what could be described as the pessimistic Buddhist mindset, of which Hartmann and Schopenhauer were devotees.

But our mind cannot remain satisfied — the mind of Buddhism itself did not remain satisfied — with this evasion at the very root of the whole matter. In the first place, these philosophies, while thus putting aside the root question, do actually make far-reaching assertions that assume, not only a certain operation and symptoms, but a certain fundamental nature of the Ignorance from which their prescription of remedies proceeds; and it is obvious that without such a radical diagnosis no prescription of remedies can be anything but an empiric dealing.

This question of the point of living is really the essence of part 2 of PoF. In part one the reader was introduced to the science of freedom, part 2 sometimes goes by the title of the practice of freedom. With Steiner as with Aurobindo the individual human being experiences himself/herself as a soul capable of receiving moral intuitions and moral imaginations from higher beings and also creating them out of the impulse of love for the world. The world is thus transformed into a space where the highest moral imaginations can be made manifest in the world of the senses. Human beings acting out of love and freedom are co-creators in the future heaven on earth. This is a radical departure from the pessimism of Buddhism and the meaninglessness of life in the Western tradition. The foundation for this worldview is found most clearly expressed in chapter 9, The Idea of Freedom and chapter 11, World Purpose and Life Purpose (The Ordering of Man’s Destiny).

Dialectical Intellect

For the dialectical intellect is not a sufficient judge of essential or spiritual truths; moreover, very often, by its propensity to deal with words and abstract ideas as if they were binding realities, it wears them as chains and does not look freely beyond them to the essential and total facts of our existence. Intellectual

Another area in which Steiner and Aurobindo are in agreement is the importance of intellectual thinking and associated mental pictures. The mental pictures are in the world of Steiner considered dead pictures of living spiritual realities or as we said earlier, they are truths which hide a truth. Another way of describing this could be say that elements of the truth can manifest in these dead mosaic like pictures. Aurobindo describes how the dialectical intellect is important for clarifying and justifying our expression of the vision and the knowledge, but it cannot be allowed to govern conceptions. Thus both thinkers recognize the Mind (Aurobindo), mental picture (Steiner) as precursors to a future evolution in mankind’s thinking.

Aurobindo concludes the chapter with a description of the individual’s relation to knowing the world expressed in a way that enhances the meaning of life and the value of the struggle. The tone of this passage is noteworthy because it speaks to the same ennobling description for an ethical individualist’s relationship to knowing the world.

But if we find that Knowledge and Ignorance are light and shadow of the same consciousness, that the beginning of Ignorance is a limitation of Knowledge, that it is the limitation that opens the door to a subordinate possibility of partial illusion and error, that this possibility takes full body after a purposeful plunge of Knowledge into a material Inconscience but that Knowledge too emerges along with an emerging Consciousness out of the Inconscience, then we can be sure that this fullness of Ignorance is by its own evolution changing back into a limited Knowledge and can feel the assurance that the limitation itself will be removed and the full truth of things become apparent, the cosmic Truth free itself from the cosmic Ignorance.

Conclusion

It feels important to stress here that I am only scraping the surface of the similarities in thinking between Sri Aurobindo and Rudolf Steiner here. For a Steiner reader like myself reading “The Life Divine” is like reading confirmation from a second witness about what Steiner says are spiritual facts. Lovers of Aurobindo will naturally see this from the reverse perspective and this is equally valid. Lovers of the truth will rejoice and unite in reading how two of humanity’s most accomplished initiates create a picture of reality so awe inspiring in depth and breadth that its very existence helps the reader to sense that Brahman or the Logos was close at hand when they were living and writing at the end of the 19^th and beginning of the 20^th century.