The Synthesis of Yoga - Sri Aurobindo Ashram

The Gradations of the Supermind 813
reason is of a more limited character because, although not of
the mental stamp and although an operation of the direct truth
and knowledge, it is a delegated power for a range of purposes
greater in light, but still to a certain extent analogous to those
of the ordinary human will and reason; it is in the yet greater
supermind that there comes the direct, altogether revealed and
immediate action of the Ishwara in the human being. These
distinctions between the intuitive mind, the divine reason and
the greater supermind, and others within these gradations themselves,
have to be made because eventually they become of great
importance. At first the mind takes all that comes from beyond
it without distinction as the sufficient spiritual illumination and
accepts even initial states and first enlightenments as a finality,
but afterwards it finds that to rest here would be to rest in a
partial realisation and that one has to go on heightening and
enlarging till at least there is reached a certain completeness of
divine breadth and stature.
It is difficult for the intellect to grasp at all what is meant by
these supramental distinctions: the mental terms in which they
can be rendered are lacking or inadequate and they can only
be understood after a certain sight or certain approximations
in experience. A number of indications are all that at present it
can be useful to give. And first it will be enough to take certain
clues from the thinking mind; for it is there that some of the
nearest keys to the supramental action are discoverable. The
thought of the intuitive mind proceeds wholly by four powers
that shape the form of the truth, an intuition that suggests its
idea, an intuition that discriminates, an inspiration that brings in
its word and something of its greater substance and a revelation
that shapes to the sight its very face and body of reality. These
things are not the same as certain movements of the ordinary
mental intelligence that look analogous and are easily mistaken
for the true intuition in our first inexperience. The suggestive intuition
is not the same thing as the intellectual insight of a quick
intelligence or the intuitive discrimination as the rapid judgment
of the reasoning intellect; the intuitive inspiration is not the
same as the inspired action of the imaginative intelligence, nor