The Role of the Mind in the Search for Ultimate Truth

As mental beings we tend to believe that the mind is able to determine the truth of things. We soon learn, however, that there are many issues that prevent the mind from actually ascertaining truth in any ultimate form. We rely on the perceptions of our senses, but those senses can be misled. Witness the ‘deep fakes’ we find nowadays on the internet, and the ‘photoshopped’ images. We may believe they are true representations but if we examine more closely we find that they are not only fictional but intentionally misleading. There is an old proverb that says one should believe only half of what one sees and nothing of what one hears. That proverb is however long outdated! Nowadays we find that we have to constantly question what we experience with our senses. It is not, however, just misleading data provided to the senses, but limited and narrowly framed data that also creates false impressions for us. The mind does not generally perceive the entirety of the situation, facts, circumstances, backgrounds and direction of the energy, and thus, will tend to reach inaccurate and skewed conclusions about what is taking place. We are also subject to flawed reasoning from the observations we make. We may leap to conclusions, or we may use a line of reasoning that embodies one of the known logic-flaws that philosophers have identified. Sri Aurobindo, in The Life Divine, enumerates the sevenfold ignorance, which identifies not just these noted weaknesses in our intellectual process, but others as well, including our temporal ignorance where we do not take into account the process of Time.

We may conclude, from such an analysis, that the mind is doomed to be a flawed and misleading instrument and thus, not able to perceive truth. However, we also find that we aspire for truth, we seek for truth, and many of the flaws we have identified in our perception and in our processes of reasoning are the result of our very seeking for truth in what we experience. Human beings are not content with falsehood, and once they discover it, they seek for ways to overcome its influence.

It is this aspiration for truth that allows the mind to eventually tune itself to a higher level of consciousness which cures the very flaws that are embedded in the mental domain. It can become receptive to truth. The lectures on Raja Yoga by Swami Vivekananda describe the need for the mind-stuff to become still, in order to be able to reflect the deeper truth of our existence. Sri Aurobindo describes the silent mind as a receptacle that can perceive and express a higher consciousness that is based on knowledge by identity, which is the basis of perceiving truth. All other forms of knowledge, described at length in The Life Divine, have their limitations and flaws. It is only knowledge by identity that gives us a true understanding, and it is possible that the mind, in its aspiration and seeking for something true and real, is an instrument that is intended to lead us to the edge of the next stage of conscious evolution.

Sri Aurobindo observes: “Mind has a power also for truth; it opens its thought-chamber to Vidya as well as to Avidya, and if its starting-point is Ignorance, if its passage is through crooked ways of error, still its goal is always Knowledge: there is in it an impulse of truth-seeking, a power, — even though secondary and limited, — of truth-finding and truth-creation. Even if it is only images or representations or abstract expressions of truth that it can show us, still these are in their own manner truth-reflections or truth-formations, and the realities of which they are forms are present in their more concrete truth in some deeper depth or on some higher level of power of our consciousness.”

Sri Aurobindo and the Mother, Powers Within, Chapter XVIII Mind, pg. 140