Page 320 - Complete Works of Dr. KCV Volume 1

all physical speeds. Intellect, lifting itself up beyond the levels of perception and observation, delivers certain axiomatic truths, which have proved invaluable in research, even in the physical and biological sciences. Whilst it soars beyond, it also analyses minutely. In one sense the very conceptions of bigger than the biggest and smaller than the smallest, and minuter than the minutest, are all mental concepts, necessary for man's progress in the scales of the scales of the cosmos and microcosm. The mind is not more real than matter, but the mind is certainly subtler than matter, and it may well be that life is the bridge between the two. It is in organic life that we find mind is real to matter, and matter is real to mind.
Cosmic consciousness is more than the material, and more than the mental, even in its higher reaches; in this sense that mind awareness is multidimensional, and reveals certain aspects of transcendence over space and time. Thus certain awareness of things and persons beyond the possibility of perception and inferences also become possible. A higher mental being is omniscient and omnipresent in a sense, which the lower mental being can hardly imagine.
It is the assiduous cultivation of spiritual aspiration to see beyond the gross and the subtle that precipitates the awareness that goes beyond the particular and the universals of conception. Cosmic consciousness must be distinguished from the universal abstract notion of it. This latter is a method by which one abstracts from the perception of the particular in order to arrive at the conception of the universal, which is held to be the goal of perception. This has been said to be practised steadily by philosophers so that the form of the particular, resident in all of them, can be abstracted from them by the mind. The mind thus is made to arrive at the notion of the form. Laws governing particulars are similarly inducted. This is undoubtedly a clear enough substitute for the intuition of the universal. Most abstractionist yoga, and mathematical and scientific ideation or phenomena belong to this order of experience. It is very much likely that it is a very near-cosmic phenomenon, though a construction by the mind. It may perhaps even be said to be a mental perception (manasa-pratyaksa) or conception, without the possible implication of its having been produced by the mind or being a product of the mind itself.