The Forms of Knowledge: the Mind’s Knowledge and the Soul’s Knowledge

In a chapter titled ‘Knowledge by Identity and Separative Knowledge’ in The Life Divine, Sri Aurobindo describes true knowledge as coming through identity, where the knower and the object of knowledge are one and unified. This occurs through the direct relation of the soul with the Divine in a state of oneness. Sri Aurobindo writes: ”Our surface cognition, our limited and restricted mental way of looking at our self, at our inner movements and at the world outside us and its objects and happenings, is so constituted that it derives in different degrees from a fourfold order of knowledge. The original and fundamental way of knowing, native to the occult self in things, is a knowledge by identity; the second, derivative, is a knowledge by direct contact associated at its roots with a secret knowledge by identity or starting from it, but actually separated from its source and therefore powerful but incomplete in its cognition; the third is a knowledge by separation from the object of observation, but still with a direct contact as its support or even a partial identity; the fourth is a completely separative knowledge which relies on a machinery of indirect contact, a knowledge by acquisition which is yet, without being conscious of it, a rendering or bringing up of the contents of a pre-existent inner awareness and knowledge.”

Much of what parades as knowledge is actually received opinions that are regurgitated without any personal knowledge, study, facts, or insight! This is frequently colored by incomplete facts, misperception, bias and prejudice and dogma or through an education process that does not aid the individual in actually understanding how to go about acquiring knowledge and appreciating its provenance. Additionally, intellectual knowledge is by its very nature narrow and limited, incomplete and lacking an overview of all necessary facts and relationships that are part of whatever is being reviewed. The human powers of logic and the higher Reason can develop and defend an opinion, but they are equally able to defend truth and falsehood, and partial truth and temporary truths, as they are quite separated from direct experience, knowledge and relation to what is to be known in its completeness. 

“What the soul sees and has experienced, that it knows; the rest is appearance, prejudice and opinion.” [Sri Aurobindo, Thoughts and Aphorisms]

The Mother observes: ”This amounts to saying that all knowledge which is not the result of the soul’s vision or experience is without true value. … But the question immediately arises – it was, in fact, put to me — ‘How do we know what the soul sees?’ “

“Obviously there is only one solution: to become conscious of one’s soul. And this completes the aphorism: unless one is conscious of one’s soul one does not have true knowledge. Therefore the first effort must be to find the soul within, to unite with it and allow it to govern one’s life.”

“Some people ask, ‘How do we know whether this is the soul?’ I have already answered this question several times. Those who ask this question, by the very fact of asking it, prove that they are not conscious of their souls, because as soon as you are conscious of your soul and identified with it, you have a positive knowledge of it and you no longer ask how you are to know. And that experience can neither be counterfeited nor imagined; you cannot pretend to be in contact with your soul — it is something which cannot be contrived or counterfeited. When the soul governs your life, you know it with absolute certainty and no longer ask any questions.”

“But the usefulness of the aphorism we have just read is to make you understand that everything you think you know, everything you have learnt, anything that has come to you in your life through personal observation, deduction, comparison — all that is a very relative knowledge on which you cannot found a durable and truly effective way of life.”

“How many times we have repeated this: all that comes from the mind is wholly relative. The more the mind is educated and has applied itself to various disciplines, the more it becomes capable of proving that what it puts forward or what it says is true. One can prove the truth of anything by reasoning, but that does not make it true. It remains an opinion, a prejudice, a knowledge based on appearances which are themselves more than dubious.”

Sri Aurobindo and the Mother, Our Many Selves: Practical Yogic Psychology, Chapter 6, Some Answers and Explanations, pp. 185-186