-06_ Notes On The Texts

Notes on the Texts

Record of Yoga: 20 April-20 May 1918. NB R19, 1-64. The Record of this period fills a 64-page "Aryan Store Exercise-Book" which Sri Aurobindo entitled "Notebook of the Sadhana". (The manager of the Aryan Store was Saurin Bose, the "S" or "Sn" of the Record.) This was the first notebook to be used exclusively for the Record since June—September 1914.

In this notebook, Sri Aurobindo twice used the Latin word sors for what he usually called "sortilege". The sors of 30 April is from the Bhagavad Gita (7.8), that of 10 May from the Rg Veda (9.69.10).

Record of Yoga: 21 May-1 July 1918. NB R20, 1-17. Sri Aurobindo continued the Record of 1918 in another "Aryan Store Exercise-Book" like the one used from 20 April to 20 May. Only three entries were made in June due to "the absorption of work". After the entry of 1 July, the notebook was set aside and not taken up again until June 1919.

During this period, Sri Aurobindo experimented with an elaborate method of recording the various positions of the body employed in his practice of secondary utthapana (see the Glossary under asana and utthapana). It is clear from the manuscript that he was making up or-modifying the system as he went along. In the entry of 24 May, where this notation was first used, he altered "positions I & II" to "positions A la & b". The two subsequent references to these positions were changed accordingly from "I" and "II" to "la" and "lb". There are not enough examples of the system to determine the exact meaning of all its elements. However, it is of interest as an illustration of Sri Aurobindo's concern with scientific accuracy of notation.

Record of Yoga: 24 June-14 July 1919. NB R20, 18-59. The Record of this period was kept in the notebook begun on 21 May 1918 and fills most of the pages that remained after the notebook was set aside on 1 July 1918. Five pages were left blank between the entry of that date and the entry of 24 June 1919. No Record was kept (or none survives) for the intervening period of almost a year.

The terms "logistic" and "logistis", which Sri Aurobindo used in the Record of 1919—20 to describe the first level of vijnana (corresponding evidently to what he later called Higher Mind), were introduced at this time. The word "logistic" was employed in a sense derived directly from the Greek logistikos, "skilled in reasoning". As explained in the Record of 20 July 1919, the "logistic ideality" (also called "logistic gnosis" or "logistis") is "a divine reason". Its essence is smrti, which "remembers . . . the knowledge secret in the being but lost by the mind in the oblivion of the ignorance". Beyond it is the "hermetic gnosis", whose essence is sruti or "divine inspiration". But the logistic ideality itself has three forms: (1) "the lowest or primary logistic gnosis, of the nature of the intuition of the immediate", (2) "the secondary logistic gnosis of the nature of inspiration", and (3) "the tertiary logistic gnosis of the nature of revelation" (6 July 1919). This may be compared with what Sri Aurobindo had written the previous year (19 May 1918) about the "inferior ideality" (also called "primary ideality") with its "three forms, revelatory,

inspirational and intuitional". In the August 1920 issue of the Arya, Sri Aurobindo wrote about the "supramental reason":

There are three elevations in this reason, one in which the action of what we may call a supramental intuition gives the form and the predominant character, one in which a rapid supramental inspiration and one in which a large supramental revelation leads and imparts the general character, and each of these raises us to a more concentrated substance and a higher light, sufficiency and scope of the truth will and the truth knowledge.¹

It should be noted that "supramental" here is equivalent to "supra-intellectual" and does not, as in Sri Aurobindo's later writings, refer to a consciousness beyond the Overmind.

Another term that begins to appear in the Record at this time is "intuivity". Its fairly numerous occurrences indicate that this is a deliberate coinage, not a slip of the pen for "intuitivity", which also occurs. Both terms evidently relate to the "intuitive mind", a transitional faculty between the intellectual mind and the gnosis. Their precise distinction is elusive and does not seem to be consistently maintained. For example, in the Record of 14 July 1919, "pragmatic intuivity" would appear to mean the same thing as "pragmatic intuitivity". Similarly, "truth reflecting intuivity""does not seem to be different from "truth reflecting intuitivity". Only the lowest of the three forms of the intuitive mentality is consistently termed the "mechanical intuivity" (24 June and 14 July 1919).

¹The Synthesis of Yoga, "The Gradations of the Supermind" (Arya, Vol. 7, 15 August 1920, p. 12).