Page 18 - All India Magazine Jun-2026

and awaken it enough for it to make an effort to understand.
One must not take this Aphorism literally. Some people seem
worried by the idea that reason must disappear for one to be-
come wise. It is not that, it is not that at all.
Reason must no longer be the summit and the master.
For a very long time in life, until one possesses anything
resembling Knowledge, it is indispensable that reason be the
master, otherwise one is the plaything of one's impulses, one's
fancies, one's more or less disordered emotional imaginings,
and one is in danger of being very far removed not merely from
wisdom but even from the knowledge needed for conducting
oneself acceptably. But when one has managed to control all
the lower parts of the being with the help of reason, which is
the apex of ordinary human intelligence, then if one wants to
go beyond this point, if one wants to liberate oneself from or-
dinary life, from ordinary thought, from the ordinary vision of
things, one must, if I may say so, stand upon the head of rea-
son, not trampling it down disdainfully, but using it as a step-
ping stone to something higher, something beyond it, to attain
to something which concerns itself very little with the decrees
of reason; something which can allow itself to be irrational
because it is a higher irrationality, with a higher light; some-
thing which is beyond ordinary knowledge and which receives
its inspirations from above, from high above, from the divine
Wisdom.
That is what this means.
As for the knowledge of which Sri Aurobindo speaks here,
it is ordinary knowledge, it is not Knowledge by identity; it
is knowledge that can be acquired by the intellect through
thought, through ordinary means.
But once again — and in any case we shall have occasion
to return to this when we study the next Aphorism — do not

All India Magazine, June 2026
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