Collated by Tusar Nath Mohapatra
But perhaps the greatest discovery of the psychology of integral yoga is the subliminal. The subliminal is the meeting place of the involved and evolved consciousness. It consists of an inner mind, an inner vital being and an inner subtle physical being, larger than our conscious being and nature. Like superconscient, it is also continuous with the outer world. It has subtle senses through which it can directly experience the universal in all its levels. It gives us inspirations, intuitions, ideas, will and sense-suggestions and urges to action etc. through trance and deep sleep. It is the seer of inner things and of supra-physical experiences. It is called subliminal not because it is lower but simply because it is behind the veil.
Sri Aurobindo ascribes to subliminal, the occult power of telepathy, clairvoyance etc. It can immensely widen the scope of knowledge though for the outer mind, it is difficult to understand its symbols and images. The most important power of the subliminal, which makes it so much useful in yoga, is its widening to come in direct contact with the entire outer world. It can thus directly know the other selves and the outer world. It can have an immediate, ultimate, accurate and spontaneous knowledge of persons, objects, occult powers and intangible energies of world-nature that surround us and impinge upon our personality, physicality, mind-force and life-force. It can even look into future and into the possible courses of the subtle world-powers.
With the help of the subliminal, the soul can truly control the mental, vital and physical, thus leading to an integral transformation and integral knowledge. Such a knowledge, however, is incomplete till one goes to the other ends of the subliminal, the lower and the higher, the subconscient and the superconscient. The subliminal as opposed to subconscient, is a secret intraconscient or circumconscient. It is by the gradual widening of this subliminal that the individual tends to become more and more universal, and by the breaking of its walls that man attains cosmic consciousness and thus becomes a true universal-individual.
Other Authors Ram Nath Sharma Chapter V: Self and Individuality The Integral View of Sri Aurobindo Subliminal
https://incarnateword.in/other-authors/ram-nath-sharma/the-philosophy-of-sri-aurobindo/subliminal
As we have already seen, in his revelations regarding the physical, the vital and the mental manifestations of the Divine Consciousness, Sri Aurobindo integrates into his spiritual and apocalyptic accounts what the twentieth century sciences of evolution broadly say about the emergence of Matter (in all its three forms,–gas, liquid and solid), Life and Mind in the origin and evolution of the universe. According to modern science, the first of the three to manifest was Matter. That is why Aswapathy as the Traveller of the Worlds unravels in Canto II the mystery of the Physical with reference to its subtle manifestation. Since, scientifically speaking, Life evolved out of solid matter on earth, the second set of revelations to be realised and made by Aswapathy (really speaking, Sri Aurobindo himself) have got to be about the apocalyptic nature of Life as a manifestation of Consciousness following its manifestation as Matter.
The revelations made about the manifestation of Life are nothing but revelations made about the Vital world. They are also based on twentieth century sciences dealing with evolution. In this sense all the apocalypticism in Savitri is an example of revelations made in the twentieth century. But since Sri Aurobindo envisons and reveals the apocalyptic mystery of the Physical, the Vital and the Mental worlds against the background of his Integral Philosophy based on the Indian Vedantic and Tantric spirituality as well as on his own, and therefore Indian version of Involution-Evolution, Savitri also becomes an example of twentieth century apocalyptic literature.
According to evolutionary sciences, emergence of life in the evolution of the universe began on a low level first. Sri Aurobindo, therefore, apocalyptically conceptualises the mystery of what he calls the Lower Vital, after he gives a general description of the Glory and Fall of Life at the outset of Aswapathy's spiritual journey into the various parts of the world of the Vital manifestation of Consciousness. Significantly, he calls the first emergence of Life as "The Glory and Fall of Life". As in the case "The Kingdom of Subtle Matter", he explores the Vital Plane as a traveller who has undertaken an inward vision-like journey by descending into his own inner being.
Long before Savitri was complete, Sri Aurobindo had anticipated the ‘inaccessibility' of the mystical stuff of the poem to the average reader. He was flooded with questions and queries and criticisms while he was still in the process of composing it. This was perhaps because it was a new kind of poetry to be written in English. In matter and spirit the poetry of Savitri did not bring anything entirely new to Indian sensibility, so it will be wrong to say that the ‘unconventionality' of the theme posed a problem. Indian cultural history had seen a flourish of spiritual poetry in the Vedas and the Upanishads. Sri Aurobindo only thought it proper to render his own knowledge and experiences of spirituality in English. He had felt that 'the expression of spirituality in the English tongue is needed and no one can give the real stuff like Easterners and especially Indians' [Sri Aurobindo, Letters on Poetry and Art: Indo-English Poetry].
Ironically, the use of the English language was seen as one of the major demerits of the poem and made for much contempt and misunderstanding. Kathleen Raine was among those who accused him of his failure as a poet, because he wrote in English and not in his 'mother tongue' Bengali. The character of the English language itself can be put up as the first defence against such a charge. What we know today as the 'English' language is a fusion of many dialects, which gives it its plasticity of character and its adaptability to many foreign / alien temperaments. And it is not that Sri Aurobindo was the first or the only poet to write mystical poetry in English. The English language has offered itself as a convenient vehicle for the utterances of the soul, as we find in the poetry of Wordsworth, Blake, Hopkins, Whitman, the metaphysical poets. Religious and mystical verses from other languages and cultures have been successfully translated in English and are immensely readable.
Yet the poetic possibilities of the language were by no means expended. With Sri Aurobindo wider possibilities were opened up, the English language became an appropriate medium for conveying ideas of Indian spiritualism and the poet's own yogic experiences, as spiritualism and the English language both are characterized by their 'synthetical and assimilative' nature. In the course of his experiments with poetry and the English language, Sri Aurobindo discovered the immense possibilities of the English tongue and the easy adaptability of the language to the Indian temperament
Many are the gifts of inconscient Nature to man. The romantic poets spoke of these gifts but each spoke only of a particular gift and joy of Nature as if that were the only gift which Nature gives. In no romantic poet there is mention of an all comprehensive, a totality of these gifts of Nature. To Wordsworth, Nature was 'the anchor of my purest thoughts', 'the soul of all my moral being'. To Shelley, she is the "Spirit of Delight." To Keats, she gives sensuous joy through beauty of forms. Each has a truth in it, but a limiting one. To Sri Aurobindo, Nature's bounty is unlimited, even at the inconscient stage. In truth Nature gifts her wealth and joy according to capacity of the receiver and the consciousness he is in. Receiver's aspiration, his aim of approach, the poise of his being play a very significant role in this regard. There cannot be any generalisation that this and this shall be the gifts of Nature to all. Sri Aurobindo's idea in this direction is a highly integrated one...
Aurobindo's concept of Nature is in its totality a revolutionary one. Nature in inanimate objects of inconscient Matter presents only a horizontal movement, for the power of consciousness is still involved in material objects. In this horizontal movement of Nature it seems that she has been trying to find an opening for release of the involved consciousness and spirit through clash and clasp, ruin and chaos, beauty and joy
