Manas or the “sense mind” as Sri Aurobindo puts it, pertains to the functioning of the mind and is in fact the true sense of our mental cognition. “Manas, say our philosophers, is the sixth sense. But we may even say that it is the only sense and that the others, vision, hearing, touch, smell, taste are merely specialisations of the sense-mind which, although it normally uses the sense-organs for the basis of its experience, yet exceeds them and is capable of a direct experience proper to its own inherent action.” One manifestation of this sense mind is our rational thought which is therefore also limited by its scope and by the physical organs it employs. There are ranges beyond it, intuition for instance, climbing far above these dwarfish peaks. When the yogic-spiritual vision opens out, the subtler senses awake and suddenly the invisible vistas come into view. A perceptive rational mind might kind of get a feel of them but to present their findings to the rational mind in any analytical manner is always to invite its irrational wrath.

Let us go to the description of samjñana in The Synthesis of Yoga (pp. 863-65):

…a fourth action of the supramental consciousness completes the various possibilities of the supramental knowledge. This still farther accentuates the objectivity of the thing known, puts it away from the station of experiencing consciousness and again brings it to nearness by a uniting contact effected either in a direct nearness, touch, union or less closely across the bridge or through the connecting stream of consciousness of which there has already been mention. It is a contacting of existence, presences, things, forms, forces, activities, but a contacting of them in the stuff of the supramental being and energy, not in the divisions of matter and through the physical instruments, that creates the supramental sense, samjñana. It is a little difficult to make the nature of the supramental sense understood to a mentality not yet familiar with it by enlarged experience, because our idea of sense action is governed by the limiting experience of the physical mind and we suppose that the fundamental thing in it is the impression made by an external object on the physical organ of sight, hearing, smell, touch, taste, and that the business of the mind, the present central organ of our consciousness, is only to receive the physical impression and its nervous translation and so become intelligently conscious of the object. In order to understand the supramental change we have to realise first that the mind is the only real sense even in the physical process: its dependence on the physical impressions is the result of the conditions of the material evolution, but not a thing fundamental and indispensable. Mind is capable of a sight that is independent of the physical eye, a hearing that is independent of the physical ear, and so with the action of all the other senses. It is capable too of an awareness, operating by what appears to us as mental impressions, of things not conveyed or even suggested by the agency of the physical organs,—an opening to relations, happenings, forms even and the action of forces to which the physical organs could not have borne evidence. Then, becoming aware of these rarer powers, we speak of the mind as a sixth sense; but in fact it is the only true sense organ and the rest are no more than its outer conveniences and secondary instruments, although by its dependence on them they have become its limitations and its too imperative and exclusive conveyors. Again we have to realise—and this is more difficult to admit for our normal ideas in the matter—that the mind itself is only the characteristic instrument of sense, but the thing itself, sense in its purity, samjñana, exists behind and beyond the mind it uses and is a movement of the self, a direct and original activity of the infinite power of its consciousness. The pure action of sense is a spiritual action and pure sense is itself a power of the spirit.

Aren’t our senses miles and miles away from this true sense which alone can bring proper underlying knowledge about the physical world to us? But the weird aspect of an enthusiast to present the spiritual knowledge and spiritual action of the pure sense to what is beyond the rational mind’s total capacity could lead to unacceptable distortions. This is a danger and must be avoided. A clear distinction has to be made between the suprarational and rational domains of knowledge. Human urge to understand things is perfectly understandable, but it has to also develop appropriate instruments and tools if it desires to acquire that which belongs to the domains of the spirit. Our hurry in this matter, of imposing one over the other, can be injurious. Any non-recognition of the fundamental difference between the two can in fact land us into irreconcilable contradictions.

RY Deshpande