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The Yogic narrative of experiential contact with the tertiary poise
An experiential contact gives a differential impression of the poise
of unity at the level of the tertiary supermind which projects the
multiplicity and at the level of the multiplicity per se which has
forgotten how it was projected.
1. The unity-principle is not spontaneously manifest at the level
of the multiplicity. This is natural or else the multiple forms in
creation would not have achieved maximum individualisation and
potentiality. The unity at this level needs to be re-constructed in
different ways. Scientists seek some sort of substrate unity by
exploring the commonality in the building blocks of atoms and cells
or by reducing everything in terms of matter-energy. Others seek
unity in the cosmic harmony or in the realm of ideas, love or values
or by erecting a gestalt. Spiritual seekers try to perceive the
unity by surpassing the ego.
2. The unity-principle at the tertiary poise of the Supermind is
a fundamental and basic unity that projects the multiplicity. It is
‘a blissful dualism in unity’. It reflects a unity that holds the
truth of multiplicity without sacrificing the truth of unity. The
tertiary poise reveals the unitary truth in the world of diversity
without rejecting the diversity.
‘Here the character of the play would be altered, but only in so far
as the individual Divine would so predominantly make the play of
relations with the universal and with its other forms the practical
field of its conscious experience that the realisation of utter
unity with them would be only a supreme accompaniment and constant
culmination of all experience; but in the higher poise unity would
be the dominant and fundamental experience and variation would be
only a play of the unity. This tertiary poise would be therefore
that of a sort of fundamental blissful dualism in unity – no longer
unity qualified by a subordinate dualism – between the individual
Divine and its universal source, with all the consequences that
would accrue from the maintenance and operation of such a dualism.
‘It may be said that the first consequence would be a lapse into the
ignorance of Avidya which takes the Many for the real fact of
existence and views the One only as a cosmic sum of the Many. But
there would not necessarily be any such lapse. For the individual
Divine would still be conscious of itself as the result of the One
and of its power of conscious self-creation, that is to say, of its
multiple self-centration conceived so as to govern and enjoy
manifoldly its manifold existence in the extension of Time and
Space; this true spiritual individual would not arrogate to itself
an independent or separate existence. It would only affirm the truth
of the differentiating movement along with the truth of the stable
unity, regarding them as the upper and lower poles of the same
truth, the foundation and culmination of the same divine play; and
it would insist on the joy of the differentiation as necessary to
the fullness of the joy of the unity…..For the secondary and
tertiary Supermind would only develop and apply in terms of the
divine multiplicity what the primary Supermind had held in the terms
of the divine unity’. (The Life Divine, pg 160-161)
The immaculate Divine All-Wonderful
Casts into the argent purity of his soul
His splendour and his greatness and the light
Of self-creation in Time’s infinity
As into a sublimely mirroring glass.
Man in the world’s life works out the dreams of God.
(Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, pg 479)
Date of Update:
23-Apr-15
- By Dr. Soumitra Basu
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