Sage is someone who lives in the higher domains of the mind, the higher Mind, and from there exercises a certain degree of mastery upon the animal vital nature. He is someone with a higher thought.
Seer is one who has seen the Truth since the faculty of revelation and inspiration have opened in him. As a result his speech changes into the mould of a higher consciousness and reaches a higher intensity of rhythm, the mantra. The seer may or may not be a saintly or holy man but the Divine uses his mouth and speech to express some higher truth that is like a new revelation and brings in changes in the thoughts of people.
The Mother speaks of a Sage as someone who is full of goodwill and Compassion for all.
‘I have found people who have goodwill for everyone.’
These are the true sages…
In an age like ours success alone counts and the material satisfactions it brings. However, an ever-increasing number of dissatisfied people are seeking to know the reason of life. And, on the other hand, there are sages who know and strive to help suffering humanity and to spread the light of knowledge. When the two meet, he who knows and he who wants to know, there springs up a new hope in the world, and a little light penetrates the prevailing darkness.’
Sri Aurobindo reveals about the Rishi, the seer.
‘The Rishies were inspired thinkers, not working through deductive reason or any physical process of sense-subdual. The energy of their personalities was colossal; wrestling in fierce meditation with God, they had become masters of incalculable spiritual energies, so that their anger could blast peoples and even the world was in danger when they opened their lips to utter a curse. This energy was by the principle of heredity transmitted, at least in the form of a latent and educable force, to their offspring. Afterwards as the vigour of the race exhausted itself, the inner fire dwindled and waned. But at first even the unborn child was divine. When Chyavan was in the womb, a Titan to whom his mother Puloma had been betrothed before she was given to Bhrigou, attempted to carry off his lost love in the absence of the Rishi. It is told that the child in the womb felt the affront and issued from his mother burning with such a fire of inherited divinity that the Titan ravisher fell blasted by the wrath of an infant. For the Rishies were not passionless. They were prone to anger and swift to love. In their pride of life and genius they indulged their yearnings for beauty, wedding the daughters of Titans or mingling with nymphs of Paradise in the august solitudes of hills and forests. From these were born those ancient and sacred clans of a prehistoric antiquity, Barghoves, Barhaspaths, Gautamas, Kasyapas, into which the descendants of the Aryan are to this day divided. Thus has India deified the great men who gave her civilisation.
On earth the Rishies, in heaven the Gods. These were great and shining beings who preserved the established cosmos against the Asuras….
The Rishi is different from the saint. His life may not have been distinguished by superior holiness nor his character by an ideal beauty. He is not great by what he was himself but by what he has expressed. A great and vivifying message had to be given to a nation or to humanity; and God has chosen this mouth on which to shape the words of the message. A momentous vision has to be revealed; and it is his eyes which the Almighty first unseals. The message which he has received, the vision which has been vouchsafed to him, he declares to the world with all the strength that is in him, and in one supreme moment of inspiration expresses it in words which have merely to be uttered to stir men’s inmost natures, clarify their minds, seize their hearts and impel them to things which would have been impossible to them in their ordinary moments. Those words are the mantra which he was born to reveal and of that mantra he is the seer.’
Affectionately,
Alok Da
