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Namah Vol. 27, Issue 1, 24th April 2019

“I turned the chair to the fireplace and sank into a half sleep. The atoms flitted before my eyes…
wriggling and turning like snakes. And see, what was that? One of the snakes seized its own tail
and the image whirled scornfully before my eyes. As though from a flash of lightning. I awoke.
I occupied the rest of the night working out the consequences of the hypothesis (See Figure 1)…
Let us learn to dream gentlemen, and then we may perhaps find the truth (9)”. The symbol of
the snake was an archetypal symbol from the collective unconscious. The idea that leapt like
a flash of lightning was an intuitive idea that came from higher echelons of consciousness.

Figure 1
rd
The age-old symbol of the snake eating its tail is from a 3 Century BC Greek manuscript
that inspired the structure of the benzene molecule, a hexagon with a carbon and hydrogen
atom at each point. [Adapted from Holroyd S. Dream Worlds: vide (9).

While instinct is an infra-rational mode of knowledge, at the other end of the spectrum is
intuition which is a supra-rational mode of knowledge. Sri Aurobindo considers intuition
to be a communication to the mind from superconscient realms. In a way it can be said
that instinct is a lower form of intuition and thrives in our subconscious realms. Intuition
on the other hand “brings to man those brilliant messages from the Unknown which are the
beginning of his highest knowledge (10).” Bergson had a similar view in his last book, The
two Sources of Morality and Religion which the noted Aurobindonian scholar, S.K. Maitra,
quotes in his monograph:

“But just as there subsisted around animal instinct a fringe of intelligence, so human intelligence
preserved a halo of intuition. The latter, in man, had remained fully disinterested and conscious,
but it was only a faint glow and did not radiate very far. Yet it is from this that the light must
come… (11)”

Intuition comes sporadically but when it comes to the mind, it often gets coated with ordinary
mental constructs and gets diluted and even distorted. That is why, “Intuition is unable to

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