Our first decisive step out of our human intelligence, our normal mentality, is an ascent into a higher Mind, a mind no longer of mingled light and obscurity or half-light, but a large clarity of the Spirit.  Its basic substance is a unitarian sense of being with a powerful multiple dynamisation capable of the formation of a multitude of aspects of knowledge, ways of action, forms and significances of becoming, of all of which there is a spontaneous inherent knowledge.  It is therefore a power that has proceeded from the Overmind, — but with the Supermind as its ulterior origins, — as all these greater powers has (sic) proceeded: but its special character, its activity of consciousness are (sic) dominated by Thought; it is a luminous thought-mind, a mind of Spirit-born conceptual knowledge.  An all-awareness emerging from the original identity, carrying the truths the identity held in itself, conceiving swiftly, victoriously, multitudinously, formulating and by self-power of the Idea effectually  realizing its conceptions, is the character of this greater mind of knowledge.  This kind of cognition is the last that emerges from the original spiritual identity before the initiation of a separative knowledge, base of the Ignorance; it is therefore the first that meets us when we rise from conceptive  and ratiocinative mind, our best-organized knowledge-power of the Ignorance, into the realms of the Spirit; it is, indeed, the spiritual parent of our conceptive mental ideation and, and it is natural that this leading power or mentality should, when it goes beyond itself, pass into its immediate source. […]

[,,,]This is the Higher Mind and its aspect of cognition; but there is also the aspect of Will, of dynamic effectuation of the Truth: here we find that this greater more brilliant Mind works always on the rest of the being, the mental will, the heart and its feelings, the life, the body, through the power of thought, through the idea-force.  It seeks to purify through knowledge, to deliver through knowledge, to create by the innate power of knowledge.  The idea is put into the heart or the life as a force to be accepted and worked out; the heart and life become conscious of the idea and respond to its dynamisms and their substance begins to modify itself in that sense, so that the feelings and actions become the vibrations of this higher wisdom, are informed with it, filled with the emotion and the sense of it: the Will and the life impulses are similarly charged with its power and its urge of self-effectuation; even in the body the idea works so that, for example, the potent thought and will of health replaces its faith in illness and its consent to illness, or the idea of strength calls in the substance, power, motion, vibration of strength; the idea generates the force and form proper to the idea and imposes it on the our substance of Mind, Life or Matter.  It is in this way that the first working proceeds; it charges the whole being with a new and superior consciousness, lays the foundation of change, prepares it for superior truth of existence.

–Sri Aurobindo Ghose, The Life Divine, Chapter Chapter XXVI.