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ORIGIN AND NATURE OF MIND

The process of division continues as we descend from Overmind to Mind. Overmind is a universal consciousness, a cosmic consciousness that embraces and includes the whole cosmos. The individual centre is still linked back to its origin, so it is not truly separate from the rest of creation. In Overmind and the other higher planes above the thinking mind, one knows the world directly without needing the instrumentation of the senses.

In mind, awareness of one’s origin and oneness with all other beings is concealed deep within. Consciousness becomes limited to the individual ego and to the surface of our being. Mind is a derivative power of Supermind and an instrument through which Supermind creates the universe. Mind is a power to divide the one indivisible reality and make it appear as separate and independent things. Carrying forward our analogy, in Supermind we know that all of our personalities are aspects of one being and that our being is also one with the Divine Being. Mind is the capacity to look at each of ourselves separately and regard it as an independent existence, a separate person. In Supermind we can distinguish separate forms but we know all the time that they are all forms of the One. In mind we lose that sense of connectedness and view each form as independent of all the others and independent from the Divine and the soul. When we talk about our soul, we talk about it as something different from our ego. It is mind that gives us the experience of that division. In mind, the power of self-limitation enables the Divine to identify with individual expressions of itself and forget or lose contact in consciousness with the fact that they are all one.

In Supermind all is white light, but that white light contains all the other colors within itself. Mind acts like a prism, splitting all of the colors and viewing them separately from one another. It splits everything and divides everything up into smaller and smaller pieces. It tries to know reality by splitting it up into opposites and affirming one side or the other. For every truth of mind there is an opposite which is also true. Mind views each thing as a whole in itself and breaks it down into parts, then views each part as a whole consisting of even smaller parts. It also aggregates parts into wholes and sees these wholes as parts of greater wholes. By this process of division, mind divides all reality into opposite and contradictory pairs. It says, “This is real, that is unreal; this is true and that is false.” It divides everything into opposites. But what is it dividing? It is dividing the One, something which cannot be truly divided. What mind regards as opposites are only aspects of a greater whole. What mind regards as contradictions are actually complementary elements when viewed from Supermind.

Mind looks at the One through its prism glass and views that One as consisting of an infinite number of individual atoms. Then it goes further and discovers that each of these atoms is made up of electrons and nuclei. It goes further and splits the nuclei, seeing that it consists of neutrons and protons. It splits those too infinitely. Why does it split like this? Because the nature of mind is that it can only know things by contrast with other things. The only way mind can know anything is by distinguishing it from something else. When we see a form, such as a circle, we see the outline of the circle and distinguish what is inside it from what lies outside it. Everything the mind sees is by contrast; whereas the Supramental Consciousness sees each thing as an aspect of a greater whole and sees its right relationship to every other component of the whole. 



book | by Dr. Radut