From “Yoga Psychology and the Transformation of Consciousness: Seeing Through the Eyes of Infinity”

THE VIEW FROM INFINITY

Intimations of Infinity

While India – the home of yoga psychology – has always placed great value on intellectual understanding, the yogic tradition takes direct spiritual experience to be the foundation for any valid intellectual view. In the chapters that follow, we will describe the vision of yoga psychology in terms of the spiritual experience at the core of the Indian tradition – the experience of an infinite Consciousness,[1] an infinite Being in whom the entire universe has its existence.[i]    But it is important to remember that the description of the vision is not itself the view from infinity. It is meant only to be a pointer to an experience or way of knowing which cannot be captured in words.

The story we are about to tell of the evolution of consciousness should not be taken solely as an intellectual account of evolution. It is primarily intended to help direct attention to the various workings of the Infinite Being throughout the universe, and to provide intimations of Its Presence here and now, in our every thought, feeling and sensation, every rock, plant and animal in our environment, and each person we encounter. The various streams of the yoga tradition are one in their agreement that the ordinary human mind is not capable of perceiving the Infinite. However, yogis of all traditions have always made use of words to evoke something beyond the mind, to open a window onto the richness, beauty and vastness of that Reality which is the very substance of all we experience.

Jewish scholar Abraham Heschel describes a state of mind that can make the experience of this greater Reality more accessible. He suggests cultivating an attitude of awe which is “itself an act of insight into a meaning greater than ourselves… [enabling] us to perceive in the world intimations of the Divine… to sense the ultimate in the common and the simple; to feel in the rush of the passing the stillness of the eternal.”[ii]

But how can we cultivate an attitude of awe?  For some, a “thinning of the veil” which opens us to the sense of awe can occur in communion with the power and beauty of nature:  listening to the gentle, unearthly silence of a large metropolis blanketed in snow… watching the play of light dancing on the wind-swept surface of Lake Geneva… walking down Fifth Avenue in the hush of twilight, lost in thought, suddenly catching sight of the deep orange sunlight setting fire to skyscraper windows. The awesome quality of these experiences tends, to some extent, to calm the disjointed play of our ordinary thought, bringing about an openness and tranquility that allows for something deeper to emerge from within.

Literature, painting, dance, theatre, cinema, and religious ritual have all, since prehistoric times, been at heart, a means of softening the boundaries of our ordinary awareness, thus helping us to experience something that transcends our limited selves. In the solemn intonation of a priest’s chanting of a sacred text, our hearts softened, our minds stilled, we feel a mysterious Presence spreading throughout the cathedral… we are transported with Sri Aurobindo’s Savitri, as she voyages “through worlds of splendor and of calm”[iii] … in a darkened theater, we face death with Sir Thomas More, at peace in the noble equanimity of a high ideal.

The various practices of the yoga tradition are designed to make it possible for us to enter into this deeper experience at will, without need for external triggers. Ultimately these practices can help to dissolve the filmy screen altogether so that the “stillness of the eternal,” the soft and luminous presence of the Infinite is always and everywhere present in our experience. All yogic practice calls upon us to shift our attention – to step back from the familiar round of thoughts, feelings and sensations that tend to absorb us, and to gently redirect our attention inward. We invite you to join us in doing just that…..

 

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   An Intuitive Exercise

 

In the chapters that follow, we’re going to be looking at the same events we described in chapter one – the evolution of consciousness in the universe, the unfolding of consciousness over the course of a lifetime, and its emergence in each moment – as expressions of the interaction between the Field and the Knower of the Field. We describe the different grades of consciousness in spiders and amoebae, humans and salamanders, as well as the shifts in consciousness from infancy through adolescence, and from Australopithecus to Homo sapiens in this light.

We’d like to invite you to engage with this story as an intuitive exercise, attempting to keep a sense of the stillness behind as you read. To help connect with this experience of calm stillness, we offer at various points an evocation of the Silence that is there behind all movements of consciousness.

This way of looking provides an alternative to the view from nowhere which gives us no basis upon which to unravel the mysteries of consciousness  – where it comes from, how it exists, how it manages to unfold in such an apparently orderly manner, how all this amazing intelligence, beauty and diversity emerged out of apparently non-conscious, non-living matter. Virtually every aspect of our experience changes when it is seen as the expression of the Knower, existing within that Infinite Consciousness, unfolding for the pure joy of creative Self-expression. Everything changes when we look through the eyes of infinity.

 

Once seen in the substance and light of… eternity, the world… becomes other than it seems to the mind and senses; for then we see the universe no longer as a whirl of mind and life and matter… but as no other than [the] eternal [Divine Reality]. The universal Being in whose embrace we live… [is] a spirit who immeasurably fills and surrounds all this movement with himself – for indeed the movement too is himself – and who throws on all that is finite the splendor of his garment of infinity, a bodiless and million-bodied spirit whose hands of strength and feet of swiftness are on every side of us, whose heads and eyes and faces are those innumerable visages which we see wherever we turn, whose ear is everywhere listening to the silence of eternity and the music of the worlds.[iv]                             Sri Aurobindo, Essays on the Gita