Sri Aurobindo
Letters on Himself and the Ashram
The Complete Works of Sri Aurobindo. Volume 35
Sadhana before Coming to Pondicherry in 1910
The
Realisation of January 1908
Nirvana and the Brahman [3]
I do not think... that
the statement of supra-intellectual things necessarily involves a making of
distinctions in the terms of the intellect. For, fundamentally, it is not an
expression of ideas arrived at by speculative thinking. One has to arrive at
spiritual knowledge through experience and a consciousness of things which
arises directly out of that experience or else underlies or is involved in it.
This kind of knowledge, then, is fundamentally a consciousness and not a thought
or formulated idea. For instance, my first major experience — radical and
overwhelming, though not, as it turned out, final and exhaustive — came after
and by the exclusion and silencing of all thought — there was, first, what might
be called a spiritually substantial or concrete consciousness of stillness and
silence, then the awareness of some sole and supreme Reality in whose presence
things existed only as forms but forms not at all substantial or real or
concrete; but this was all apparent to a spiritual perception and essential and
impersonal sense and there was not the least concept or idea of reality or
unreality or any other notion, for all concept or idea was hushed or rather
entirely absent in the absolute stillness. These things were known directly
through the pure consciousness and not through the mind, so there was no need of
concepts or words or names. At the same time this fundamental character of
spiritual experience is not absolutely limitative; it can do without thought,
but it can do with thought also. Of course, the first idea of the mind would be
that the resort to thought brings one back at once to the domain of the
intellect — and at first and for a long time it may be so; but it is not my
experience that this is unavoidable. It happens so when one tries to make an
intellectual statement of what one has experienced; but there is another kind of
thought that springs out as if it were a body or form of the experience or of
the consciousness involved in it — or of a part of that consciousness — and this
does not seem to me to be intellectual in its character. It has another light,
another power in it, a sense within the sense. It is very clearly so with those
thoughts that come without the need of words to embody them, thoughts that are
of the nature of a direct seeing in the consciousness, even a kind of intimate 
sense or contact formulating itself into a precise expression of its
awareness (I hope this is not too mystic or unintelligible); but it might be
said that directly the thoughts turn into words they belong to the kingdom of
intellect — for words are a coinage of the intellect. But is it so really or
inevitably? It has always seemed to me that words came originally from somewhere
else than the thinking mind, although the thinking mind secured hold of them,
turned them to its use and coined them freely for its purposes. But even
otherwise, is it not possible to use words for the expression of something that
is not intellectual? Housman contends that poetry is perfectly poetical only
when it is non-intellectual, when it is nonsense. That is too paradoxical, but I
suppose what he means is that if it is put to the strict test of the intellect,
it appears extravagant because it conveys something that expresses and is real
to some other kind of seeing than that which intellectual thought brings to us.
Is it not possible that words may spring from, that language may be used to
express — at least up to a certain point and in a certain way — the
supra-intellectual consciousness which is the essential power of spiritual
experience? This however is by the way — when one tries to explain spiritual
experience to the intellect itself, then it is a different matter.
14 January 1934