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Notes on the Texts
Record of Yoga ("Yoga Diary"): 15 July-24 September 1919. NB R21, 1-32; NB R22, 1-32; NB R23, 1-22. The Record of this period was kept neatly in three identical notebooks which were used exclusively for this purpose. The ruled pages of these thin exercise books have a vertical red line demarcating the left margin. At the top of each entry, Sri Aurobindo usually wrote the month and date to the left of this line and the day of the week to the right of it (occasionally the reverse). The margin was otherwise left blank.
On the cover of each notebook, Sri Aurobindo wrote "Yoga Diary", a heading not used previously. Below this are the dates of the first and last entries, except in the case of the third notebook where only the starting date is written: "August 14 / 1919." This notebook has almost daily entries until 2 September, then one dated "Sept. 3 to 24" explaining the gap before the final entry of 24 September. The remaining pages were left blank. The Record was apparently not resumed until February of the next year.
Record of Yoga: 1-29 February 1920. NB R24, LS 1-28. The Record of February 1920 was kept on seven pieces of paper of different sizes and shapes folded in various ways. Two similar sheets, for example, were folded twice, horizontally and vertically, to form small booklets of eight pages eachfour on one side and four on the other. Sri Aurobindo wrote on these pages in a rather complex sequence, beginning with the outer pages, front and back, then writing on the inner pages. If the back side did not contain printed or typed matter, he then reversed the folds and wrote in the same way on the other side. As the sequence of pages is not always immediately obvious, entries which continue from one page to another sometimes have the date repeated at the top of the new page followed by "continued" or "(cont.)". These headings have been omitted from the printed text.
Note on Editorial Policy. The instalments of Record of Yoga reproduced in the present issue have been transcribed verbatim, with very minor exceptions. Three principal exceptions may be noted: (1) A few unintentional verbal repetitions of the most trivial and mechanical kind in the manuscript, such as "a a", "the the", "of of or "to to" (typicallv at the end of one line and the beginning of the next) have been silently disregarded. The transcription is otherwise strictly according to the manuscript, as far as possible; emendations have been made between square brackets and, apart from simple editorial interpolations, are accompanied by footnotes giving the manuscript readings. (2) Even punctuation is normally enclosed in square brackets if it is absent in the manuscript and has been supplied editorially, since this may sometimes affect the meaning. However, full stops missing at the end of complete sentences have been supplied without the use of square brackets. (3) In writing Sanskrit words, Sri Aurobindo sometimes used the symbol c for the sh sound now represented in formal transliteration by s. However, he occasionally omitted the cedilla. Since this was probably inadvertent, his intention of writing c has been respected in the present text; for example, "craddha", is printed where the manuscript has "craddha" for sraddha. Planes of Vijnana in the Record of Yoga, 191920
During this period of the Record, the terminology used by Sri Aurobindo to describe different levels of vijnana the higher consciousness often referred to as "ideality" or "gnosis" and occasionally as "supermind" underwent a complex development. A brief outline of this evolving system is presented below, since a familiarity with its terms and some grasp of its structure are essential for the reader of this part of the Record. The system is partially elucidated by Sri Aurobindo's published writings, especially "The Gradations of the Supermind" in The Synthesis of Yoga (Part 4, Chapter 21). However, the Record employs a somewhat different and more elaborate terminology.
It is important to understand that even in Sri Aurobindo's published writings, the meaning of the word "supermind" depends on the date of the writing and cannot always be taken in the sense he finally gave to it. "The Gradations of the Supermind" appeared in the issue of the Arya dated 15 August 1920. It is therefore approximately contemporary with the current portion of the Record; the difference in terminology is due to the difference between a diary and a writing intended for publication. The corresponding chapter in The Life Divine, "The Ascent towards Supermind" (Book 2, Chapter 26), was not present in the Arya version but appeared only in 1940 in the first edition of the revised work. By this time, Sri Aurobindo's experience of the higher planes of consciousness had undergone an immense development. This was reflected most significantly in the fundamental distinction between Supermind and Overmind, the latter being the highest of several planes above the intellectual mind which had earlier been included in the definition of "supermind".
The intricate scheme of planes and sub-planes of vijnana encountered in the Record of 191920 can be explained to the extent that an intellectual explanation is meaningful in terms of various combinations of the three suprarational faculties of intuition, inspiration and revelation. These faculties act in a diminished form even in the intuitive mentality (also called "intuitivity" or "intuivity"). This is a transitional stage between the intellectual mind and the true gnosis. Even here, there can be a complex action of the higher faculties in the mental medium. This must be distinguished from similar workings on a higher plane, which are sometimes described in almost identical language.
The lowest plane of vijnana proper is usually called in the Record of 191920 the "logistic ideality" or "logistis". This corresponds evidently to the "supramental reason" mentioned in the last chapters of The Synthesis of Yoga and to the Higher Mind in Sri Aurobindo's later writings. It is described in the Record (20 July 1919) as "a divine reason" and its essence is said to be smrti which "remembers at a second remove the knowledge secret in the being but lost by the mind in the oblivion of the ignorance". Smrti, it is said elsewhere,1 consists of intuition and viveka (intuitive discrimination), but as Sri Aurobindo explains, "the discrimination here is hardly recognisable as a separate power, but is constantly inherent in the three others".2
Intuition, in the sense in which Sri Aurobindo uses the word in the Record,
1 Sri Aurobindo Birth Centenary Library, vol. 27, Supplement, p. 369. 2 The Synthesis of Yoga (1970), p. 790. "does the work of reasoning without the necessity of reasoning to arrive at a conclusion".3 The logistic vijnana is thus a luminous intuitive reason, but the purely intuitive logistis is only its lowest level. Higher in the scale is the inspirational logistis and at its summit the revelatory logistis. In each of these grades a further threefold distinction is made on the basis of the same sequence of intuitive, inspired and revelatory.
Some of these sub-planes are given special names. For example, the expression "intellectual ideality" in the Record of 20 July 1919 refers to a "low pitched intuitional gnosis". This is evidently the "uninspired intuition", the lowest of the three forms of the intuitive logistis, for it is inferior to the "inspired intuitional" as well as to the pure "inspirational logistis". At the other end of the spectrum, the highest of the three degrees of the revelatory logistis is the "drashta logos" or "full revelation", which itself has three forms. Only the last of these represents the perfection of the logistic vijnana or "luminous reason", which Sri Aurobindo at the beginning of March, 1920, termed "the lowest total stage of the triple ideal super-mind".
Beyond the logistic ideality is the "hermetic ideality" or "hermesis", whose essence is sruti or inspiration; hence it is also called "srauta vijnana". Its action is "attended by a diviner splendour of light and blaze of fiery effulgence" (20 July 1919), a description which suggests its identity with the Illumined Mind of Sri Aurobindo's later writings. This is the "second stair of gnosis" (19 July 1919) or "second vijnana" (7 February 1920). Sri Aurobindo recorded some experiences of it at this time, but the full united movement of the Yoga could not yet be definitively established on this plane. The entry of 19 October 1920, the last before a six-year gap in the Record, ends with the description of a process which "has been commenced, but has to be completed, before the consciousness can be taken into the srauta vijnana."
Still higher is the "seer ideality", also called "highest ideality", whose essence is drsti or revelation. This plane of vijnana may be presumed to correspond to what Sri Aurobindo, revising his terminology, later called Intuition. Its frequent mention in the Record at this time is primarily with reference to its manifestation on the two lower planes and especially in the logistis. The "seer hermesis" is the highest level of the second plane, transcending the "logistis in the hermesis" and "middle hermesis"; but we get only a glimpse of this in the entry of 24 September 1919. The "seer logistis" or "seer ideality in the logistis" figures prominently in the Record of 14 August24 September 1919. The use of the word "seer" for the manifestations of the revelatory power belongs only to this brief period, but the "seer logistis" is evidently the same as what was meant at other times by "revelatory logistis", "highest logistic ideality", "drashtri logistis" and similar expressions.
It should be noted that in the Record of 1919 and 1920, when Sri Aurobindo's principal preoccupation was with what he called the logistic ideality, the word "logistic" is often understood rather than expressed before "ideality", "gnosis" and "vijnana". Thus "seer ideality", "revelatory vijnana" and equivalent phrases refer normally to the highest logistis and not to the seer ideality on its own plane above the hermetic ideality. This is often unmistakably clear, as when Sri Aurobindo
3 Sri Aurobindo: Archives and Research, April 1986, p. 9. writes at the beginning of August, 1919:
The gradations of the revelatory logistis receive detailed attention in the Record of 191920. Like the intuitional and inspirational logistis, the revelatory logistis has three levels, sometimes called intuitive revelation, inspired revelation and full revelation. These were referred to during a certain period (410 August 1919) as "intensities", intuitive revelation being the third intensity and full revelation the first intensity. But there was yet a further distinction of three forms of each of these levels. This is first seen in the Record of 9 July 1919, where Sri Aurobindo wrote:
Within a few months of this entry, similar distinctions were made with regard to the inspired revelation and the full revelation. But by this time some new terms had been introduced.
In the Record of 20 July 1919, Sri Aurobindo described the hermetic gnosis as being of the nature of "prophesis or inspired interpretation". In the entry of 14 August the word "hermeneusis", Greek for "interpretation", refers to the distinguishing characteristic of the inspirational logistis.4 The adjective "hermeneutic" (i.e., "interpretative") occurs on 28 August, where it designates an element in the "intermediate seer logistis" or inspired revelation. "Hermeneutic" does not occur again, but "Interpretative" takes its place and becomes an important term in the Record of 1920.
On 4 February 1920, the date on which Sri Aurobindo recorded "an extraordinarily rapid development of the whole system into the highest logistic ideality", he wrote for the first time of "interpretative revelatory" vijnana as the form between "intuitive revelatory" and (full) "revelatory". A few occurrences of "interpretative" between 7 and 10 February seem to point not to this but to the plane beyond the logistis or to the inspirational form of the logistis. But on 19 February, Sri Aurobindo again mentions "interpretative revelatory vijnana". The expression begins to occur frequently and it is usually clear that this faculty formerly called "inspired revelatory logistis" or simply "inspired revelation" is denoted by "interpretative" even when the word "revelatory" is omitted.
On 20 February, what had hitherto been called the "intuitive revelation" was termed for the first time "representative revelatory vijnana". After this, the terms "representative" and "interpretative" replace "intuitive" and "inspired" in most
4 The Greek word hermeneusis is the noun corresponding to the adjective hermeneutikos, from which the English "hermeneutic" is derived. The terminology of vijnana in the Record contains a few similar words ending in -is which are neither found in English dictionaries nor have recognised Greek equivalents. These include "hermesis" and "prophesis", which are formed from "hermetic" and "prophetic" in the same way as "hermeneusis" from "hermeneutic", and "logistis" which is derived from "logistic" by a variation of the same pattern. references to the forms of the revelatory logistis. "Intuitive" or "intuitional" and "inspired" or "inspirational" come to refer mainly to the lower levels of the logistic vijnana, as when Sri Aurobindo writes on 23 February 1920:
Some light is shed on Sri Aurobindo's use of the terms "representative" and "interpretative" by a passage in The Synthesis of Yoga:5
This passage suggests the essence of the distinction between "representative" and "interpretative". It does not necessarily refer to the exact planes meant by these words in the Record of 1920. But the connection of the representative action of the higher consciousness with "actualities" and the interpretative with "potentialities" is helpful for understanding the terminology of the Record. In the entry of 26 July 1919, Sri Aurobindo wrote:
There is now a struggle between two kinds of ideality, the old ideality which depends upon the existent actuality, illumines it, goes a little beyond it but from it, returns to it, acquiesces temporarily in its decisions, and a new greater pragmatic ideality which takes the present actuality as a passing circumstance, claims to go altogether beyond it, to create with a certain large freedom according to the Will and looks even beyond to the omnipotence of the Self and its will, [can] determine as well as see the future. . . . The future of the sadhana lies with this greater pragmatic ideality and with something beyond it in the hermetic ideality.
On 10 August, Sri Aurobindo distinguished between an "actualist intuitional revelation" and a "dynamic inspirational" "dynamic" replacing "pragmatic", whose last occurrence is in the entry of 89 August. These are precisely the later "representative" and "interpretative" forms of the revelatory logistic vijnana. During the remainder of August 1919, the words "actualistic" and "dynamic" appear several times in a similar sense. Soon after this, there is a gap of more than four months in the Record. In February 1920, when the terms "representative" and "interpretative" begin to be used, "actualistic" and "dynamic" cease to occur.
5 p. 793. |