Our Many Selves

The Inmost Being - The Psychic Being

Sri Aurobindo uses the term "psychic being" (from Greek psukhē, meaning the soul) for the inmost being which supports the outer and the inner beings. The psychic being in its essence, called the psyche or psychic entity, is a spark or portion of the Divine present in all things and creatures. In the course of evolution the psyche grows into an individual psychic personality in the human being and is then called the psychic being.

Whereas the universal Self, the Atman, is unborn, and stands above the evolutionary process and is unaffected by it, the psychic being is the evolving soul which, though immortal, passes through cycles of physical birth and death, growing from life to life.

"The psychic being can at first exercise only a concealed and partial and indirect action through the mind, the life and the body, since it is these parts of Nature that have to be developed as its instruments of self-expression, and it is long confined by their evolution. Missioned to lead man in the Ignorance towards the light of the Divine Consciousness, it takes the essence of all experience in the Ignorance to form a nucleus of soul-growth in the nature; the rest it turns into material for the future growth of the instruments which it has to use until they are ready to be a luminous instrumentation of the Divine .... It is the psychic personality in us that flowers as the saint, the sage, the seer; when it reaches its full strength, it turns the being towards the Knowledge of Self arid the Divine, towards the supreme Truth, the supreme Good, the supreme Beauty, Love and Bliss, the divine heights and largenesses, and opens us to the touch of spiritual sympathy, universality, oneness."²³