The Knowledge Based in the Mystic Heart

Man, the mental being. The mental capacities that are associated with the human species are considered to be our unique trait, distinguishing humanity from the rest of the animal kingdom. We drive this narrative with a focus on training and developing the mind in our schools. We believe that knowledge resides in our mental abilities. We measure intelligence through tests that are designed for the mind. We look up to scientists, philosophers, deep thinkers as models for the expression of human knowledge. We are essentially ‘brain-centric’ in the way we view and understand the power of knowledge and its impact on our lives.

Spiritual paths have developed which are based in this mental view of knowledge. Deep training of the mind, such as through mindfulness training, Vipassana, Raja Yoga and Jnana Yoga have explored the constitution and the boundaries of the mental powers. The paths based in the mind have tended toward more abstraction and distance from the life in the world.

But knowledge is not limited to that of the mind. There are other powers and elements of our being, and they each have their own unique forms of knowledge, whether we can formulate them in mental terms or not. Even the physical body has certain forms of inherent knowledge which it does not share with the mind directly. How else can we heal from a wound, how, indeed, can our entire physical system function with all the complex interactions that occur and the the inter-relations that take place in the segments of the physical body itself, without some innate knowledge at work there.

There is a vital intelligence that responds to the vibrations virtually automatically without mental analysis. Whether we are looking at the phenomena of the ‘alpha male’ or the ‘pecking order’ we find a non-mental response in the vital being to a hidden power dynamic that is taking place between people.

Various researchers in the West have begun to appreciate that there are indeed other valuable forms of knowledge not bounded within the methods and framework of the mind. There is, for instance, an entire body of knowledge related to what is called ’emotional intelligence’.

The ancient paths of yoga recognised this with the development of the yoga of love and devotion, Bhakti Yoga. This yoga focuses on the almost intuitive knowledge of Truth that comes through receptivity, aspiration, and an outflowing of love that creates a direct relation with the Divine Being. This relation provides an innate, non-mental form of knowledge that directly knows the Divine Will and seeks to carry it out.

Sri Aurobindo writes: “If knowledge is the widest power of the consciousness and its function is to free and illumine, yet love is the deepest and most intense and its privilege is to be the key to the most profound and secret recesses of the Divine Mystery. Man, because he is a mental being, is prone to give the highest importance to the thinking mind and its reason and will and to its way of approach and effectuation of Truth and, even, he is inclined to hold that there is no other. The heart with its emotions and incalculable movements is to the eye of his intellect an obscure, uncertain and often a perilous and misleading power which needs to be kept in control by the reason and the mental will and intelligence. And yet there is in the heart or behind it a profounder mystic light which, if not what we call intuition — for that, though not of the mind, yet descends through the mind — has yet a direct touch upon Truth and is nearer to the Divine than the human intellect in its pride of knowledge. According to the ancient teaching the seat of the immanent Divine, the hidden Purusha, is in the mystic heart, — the secret heart-cave hrdaye guhayam, as the Upanishads put it, — and, according to the experience of many Yogins, it is from its depths that there comes the voice or the breath of the inner oracle.”

reference: Sri Aurobindo and the Mother, The Psychic Being — Soul: Its Nature, Mission and Evolution, Section 1 Meaning and Nature of the Psychic Being, pp. 26-27