Understanding the Various Aspects of Mental Activity

Western medical researchers have invested a considerable amount of time and attention on gaining an understanding of the way the brain functions, mapping the regions of the brain responsible for various types of activities, and monitoring the function of neurotransmitter chemicals and nervous system synapses in the way we perceive external stimuli and the way we respond to the world. For Western science, the brain represents the operation of the ‘mind’. While this definition may be far too limited to provide a complete understanding, one fact has been ascertained that helps us understand that there are different functions of the mind that represent entirely different orders of mental activity.

Just as we notice that there is a level of interaction between Matter and Life in the physical vital and vital physical levels of activity, so also we can recognise that there are levels of mental activity that are intimately tied to the functioning of the physical body, providing virtually automatic responsiveness to the body’s needs and signals, without conscious mental intervention, others that are tied to the vital response to the life energies, and yet others that correspond to true mental activity focused, not on the material or vital interactions, but on the mind’s own level of capacity and activity.

Sri Aurobindo writes: “The ‘Mind’ in the ordinary use of the word covers indiscriminately the whole consciousness, for man is a mental being and mentalises everything; but in the language of this yoga the words ‘mind’ and ‘mental’ are used to connote specially the part of the nature which has to do with cognition and intelligence, with ideas, with mental or thought perceptions, the reactions of thought to things, with the truly mental movements and formations, mental vision and will, etc., that are part of his intelligence. The vital has to be carefully distinguished from mind, even though it has a mind element transfused into it; the vital is the Life-nature made up of desires, sensations, feelings, passions, energies of action, will of desire, reactions of the desire-soul in man and of all that play of possessive and other related instincts, anger, fear, greed, lust, etc., that belong to this field of the nature. Mind and vital are mixed up on the surface of the consciousness, but they are quite separate forces in themselves and as soon as one gets behind the ordinary surface consciousness one sees them as separate, discovers their distinction and can with the aid of this knowledge analyse their surface mixtures. It is quite possible and even usual during a time shorter or longer, sometimes very long, for the mind to accept the Divine or the yogic ideal while the vital is unconvinced and unsurrendered and goes obstinately on its way of desire, passion and attraction to the ordinary life. Their division or their conflict is the cause of most of the more acute difficulties of the sadhana.”

Sri Aurobindo and the Mother, Our Many Selves: Practical Yogic Psychology, Chapter 2, Planes and Parts of the Being, pp. 37-38