A wonderful poem. The last line especially really grabbed my attention. No, the mind can never break open the sealed text ... it can barely break free of its own seals, so what to speak of anything else?

So the problem is, how to impart that perception to one who is going only by the mind. This may sound a bit of a contradiction, but there is a genuine concern also behind it, not missionary zeal but concern in the prospects of discovering new human potentials. Perhaps only when mind is sincere to itself, as a seeker and discover and explorer of its own possibilities, that there is a hope. A genuine academician or scientist has a better chance there, I suppose.

~ RYD

It will be instructive to study Godel's incompleteness theorems in the background of Russell/Hilbert rationalist program. There are many references on the web explaining these things. The point here is that the "sincere" mind does know its limit.

Thanks Akash for bringing the right focus to this rationalist conundrum. In my comment I mentioned only one side,—mind opening to its possibilities,—and a zealous supra-rationalist trying to persuade the rationalist to go beyond the limits of a mental approach. The same holds good for the man of faith who himself has to be reasonable to see the reason of reason rather than a rationalist pooh-poohing and dismissing him. There seems to be present that ‘incompleteness’ everywhere, and perhaps the Uncertainty Principle in Physics is just a manifestation of the same difficulty. This Uncertainty after all may not really be physical but embedded in our mental formulations. I know, you have studied this topic,—Godel's incompleteness theorems,—well and you applied it also in the field of Economics in the context of Kenneth Arrow and James Buchanan exploring the relationship of individual and society, and their extension by Amartya Sen with social states entirely in terms of personal welfare features. May I request you to give us an introduction to this R/H rationalist program? I’ll make it an independent post by you on the Mirror. And thanks again.

~ RYD

Rationalist program or Faith’s trust—both, in fact every human attempt to exceed himself—comes in one way or the other under the “incompleteness” argument, and there doesn’t seem to be any way to break through the formulations. Yet there is always something which tells us that the doors to the unknown can be opened, one manifestation of which is in the belief in human potential. There is the urge in us to excel, to cross the seas, to climb the mountains, to soar in the sky, to reach outer spaces, to touch the floor of the Pacific.

This reminds me of Savitri’s response to transformed Death: (p. 693)

If man lives bound by his humanity,
If he is tied for ever to his pain,
Let a greater being then arise from man,
The superhuman with the Eternal mate
And the Immortal shine through earthly forms…
I have felt a secret spirit stir in things
Carrying the body of the growing God…
It climbs towards its own eternity.

This maybe an act of faith for us but if there is a completer understanding and appreciation of the whole process one also perceives its realizable merit, its realizable possibility.

~ RYD

Apropos of what we are discussing, there is elsewhere a comment nicely put by Raman Reddy. Let me reproduce it in the following:

I suppose he [the biographer of The Lives of Sri Aurobindo] is not aware that devotion, common sense and higher sense often go together with clarity of mind while the crazy intellectual, who does not have any of these saving factors, keeps weaving his fancy theories in an abstract world. A true intellectual will therefore not use his intelligence merely to deny what he would be pleased to debunk or because of a certain sadistic pleasure he derives from it, but because there is sufficient justification in his quest and enough evidence to back it up.

And of course we have the following well known lines from Savitri (p. 55):

A few shall see what none yet understands;
God shall grow up while the wise men talk and sleep;
For man shall not know the coming till its hour
And belief shall be not till the work is done.

~ RYD