The Yoga of Sri Aurobindo - Part 7

THE PSYCHIC BEING — SOME MYSTERIES

Does the psychic being progress always?

There are two kinds of progress in the psychic and they are very different. One consists in its formation and building and organisation; for the psychic begins by being only a little divine spark hidden in the inner person and out of this spark comes and gradually develops an independent conscious person who has his own will and activity. As I say, the psychic being is originally like a spark from the divine consciousness: it grows into a conscious individuality through the experiences of successive lives. This progress then is like the progress of the growing child. It is a thing in formation and it remains so for a long time in most human beings. It is not a fully individualised being there, not fully conscious and master of itself; it needs many births, one after another, to build itself and become fully conscious. In the end, however, there does come a time when it is a completed personality, fully individualised, fully conscious of itself and its destiny. When such a psychic being incarnates in a human being, it makes a great difference. For the man is born free, so to say, he is not bound to his circumstances, his surroundings or his origin or atavism, like ordinary people. When he comes upon earth, he feels he has a work to do in the world, he has a mission to fulfil. To that extent then his cycle of progress is completed, that is to say, he has no more need

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to take birth in a body to make further progress. Till then rebirth is a necessity, it is compulsory; for it is through reincarnation—taking up a new body that he progresses, develops and grows. It is in the physical life and in the physical body that the soul slowly builds itself until it becomes a fully conscious being. But once it is fully formed, it is free either to take birth or not to at will. There then one kind of progress stops. But if the fully formed being now wishes to become an instrument for the work of the Divine, if he chooses to be a worker upon earth to help in the fulfilment of the cosmic purpose of the Divine, instead of going away and resting in the psychic bliss of his own world, then he has to make a new kind of progress, a progress towards capacity to work, to organise and execute the work to express and embody the will of the Divine. As long as the world continues, as long as he chooses to work for the Divine, he will continue to progress. But if he wishes to withdraw into the psychic world and gives up or refuses to work for the divine Plan, then he can remain in the static state beyond the range of progress. For, as I have said, progress exists only upon earth in the physical world. You cannot progress everywhere. In the psychic world there is a kind of blissful repose. You remain what and where you are without moving.

Everything upon earth progresses, has to progress. All men, without exception, even those who have no sense of the psychic, whether they wish or not, must progress. The psychic progresses in them in spite of themselves

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and they have to follow the curve of its growth and development. That is to say, man ascends in the scale of life and grows, grows exactly as a child does. In the process of growth there comes a time when one reaches the summit and one changes the direction or the plane of progress. At the outset there is the purely physical progress, like that of the child; then there comes the mental progress, later on the psychic progress and the spiritual progress, so that unless progress changes its direction, when it has reached its limit on a particular level, one has to come down the curve, that is to say, instead of progression there will be retrogression, which means in the end disintegration and decomposition. Precisely because in the purely physical world there cannot be a perpetual and constant progress, there is in this domain this curve of growth, apogee, decline and decomposition. All that does not advance must recede. This is exactly what happens in the domain of matter. Matter does not know how to progress indefinitely, it has not learnt it; so after a time it is tired of progressing or growing. Given this constitution, one cannot go beyond a limit. But there is in man side by side with his physical growth, a vital growth and a mental growth as well. The mental especially can progress long after the body has ceased to progress. The body does not grow; even when it is declining, the mind still can continue to grow, to rise to higher heights. There is a mental ascension contrariwise to the physical descent. But they who do Yoga, who become conscious of their psychic being and are identified with it, who live with

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its life, never cease to progress, they move upward till the last breath of their life; even when they die their progress does not stop. The body is on the decline, because it cannot keep step with the inner march forward, it cannot transform itself and mould itself into the rhythm of the inner consciousness. The discrepancy increases so much between the two, that there is a snap at the end and that is death. However, on the purely spiritual level too there is no progress. The domain of the pure spirit means a static condition; there is no progressive movement there, for it is beyond the field of progress, beyond all manifestation. For when you are merged in the Spirit, you have come out of creation and there is no question of progress, or even of any movement.

When the psychic is about to take rebirth does it choose its form beforehand?

It depends. As I have told you now, there are psychic beings that are just on the way of formation and growth, they usually cannot choose at the beginning, they cannot choose very much. But when they have come to a certain degree of development and consciousness, they make a choice; generally when they are still in the body, when they have gathered a certain amount of experience, they decide what is to be their next field of experience. I shall give you an illustration, although somewhat external. A psychic being, for example, needed the experience of power, authority, command and wanted to know the

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reactions of these movements and also how to turn them towards the Divine, to learn, in a word, what these things can teach. So the soul took the body of a king (or a queen). When it had the necessary experience, learnt what it had to learn, it gave up the body, no longer useful. It is at that moment when it decides to leave the body but is still in the body that the soul makes the choice of the next experience. The choice very often takes a course of action and reaction. If the soul has experienced and studied a particular field, its choice falls upon a contrary field on the following occasion. Thus if the soul has had the experience of a kingly position and worked through that to enter into a conscious relation with the Divine, then at the moment of leaving the body that served with power and authority and command, it perhaps would say: "This time I shall take a middle position, neither high nor low, where there will be no need to lead mostly an external life, where one is neither in great luxury nor in great misery." With that resolution it returns to the psychic world for the necessary rest, for the assimilation of past experiences and preparation for the future. When the time comes for return upon earth, for the descent into a physical body, it remembers naturally the choice it made, but from that higher and subtler plane at that moment the material world is not seen in the way we do, it appears in a different form; still one can notice the differences in the surroundings and activities. One has not the vision of the details, but a total or global vision is there. It can choose an atmosphere, it can choose even a particular country. It has in

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view a certain kind of education, civilisation and influence, the kind of life that it wishes to lead. Then as it comes down and looks about, it distinguishes very clearly the different kinds of vibrations and makes its way accordingly. It aims, as it were, at the place where to drop. But it can hit the target only approximatively. For there are one or two other factors besides which come into play. For there is not only its own choice, from above, there must also be a receptivity from below, an aspiration that draws to it the particular being or the particular type of being. Usually the call is from a mother, sometimes from both the parents. If the parent has some aspiration or receptivity, something that is sufficiently passive and open and looking up towards something higher, in that case, the thing appears to the psychic being as a luminous vibration which beckons it. It is the answer to its will. It shows the place it is to go to. It cannot fix the day of its birth. There will naturally be a period of uncertainty, but that is not expected to go beyond a year. The second factor that somewhat modifies or qualifies his choice comes from the nature of the birth itself. The soul, the conscious being, precipitates into the inconscience, for the physical world, even human consciousness, at its very best, is an inconscient thing when compared to the psychic consciousness. It is as though the soul fell head downmost. That makes it dazed and for a long time it does not know what is what. It does not know where it is, what it is doing nor why it is there; a complete blank possesses it. It is unable to express itself, especially, as a baby, it has

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not the proper amount of brain to understand or manifest anything. Very rarely do children show the exceptional being that they have within them. Cases do occur indeed, but they are very few and far between. Generally it takes time for the soul to come to its own. It wakes up but slowly from its numbness, it is only gradually that it begins to understand that it is there for some reason and by choice. This oblivion is occasioned by the presence of the mind and mental education which completely shuts off the psychic consciousness. All kinds of circumstances, happenings, experiences—external and emotional—are then needed to strike open the doors within, to bring the memory that one comes from elsewhere and for a very special reason. It is the normal longer process. But one may have the chance of meeting early enough someone who knows; then instead of groping and fumbling through ignorance and darkness, you get the light and the help that give you the swift and straight contact.

The psychic will and psychic development are things that are completely outside the range of common notions. Ideas of justice and reward and punishment have no place here at all. Many people come to me and complain: "What have I done in my past life that I have to be under such difficult conditions now, to suffer so much!" I always reply: "But don't you see it is a blessing for you, the divine grace upon you? In your past life perhaps you yourself asked for such conditions so that you may make greater progress through them!" This way of looking at the thing may seem very new. But truth lies that way.

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How is it possible for a psychic being once living the life of intelligence and creativity to enter again into a life of stupidity and ordinariness?

I did not say quite like that. The psychic being is not stupid. What happens may be described in this way: for example, suppose the psychic being has had the experience of the life of a writer. The function of the writer is to express himself, his perceptions and observations and judgments in words: he has a certain field, a certain range of associations and circumstances in which to live and move. But there are other fields and ranges beyond and outside of which he has no experience. So he may say to himself: I have lived with my head, I know something of the intellectual reactions to life: now let me live with my heart and experience the reactions of feeling and passion. Indeed, sometimes an overactivity of the intellect impoverishes the capacities of the heart. So the psychic being, in order to have this new kind of experience, abandons his intellectual heights, so to say, and comes down to the vital plane. He is no longer a creative genius, but an ordinary man, but with a heart enriched or enriching itself with its intense or generous movements. (One can remember in this connection the story of Shankaracharya who being a Sannyasi from boyhood has had no experience of love; he entered the body of a king in order to gather this experience.) It is not rare to see psychic beings that have reached the maximum of their growth in certain directions, take up a very modest and ordinary life in some other new

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direction or for some other purpose. One who was a king, for example, as I already narrated once, who has had the experiences of power and authority and domination, the imperial heights, may choose to descend to ordinary life, to work as an obscure person without being troubled by the pomps of high position; he may choose very bourgeois surroundings, very mediocre conditions among mediocre men and things, to procure, so to say, a kind of incognito so that he may work in peace and quiet. Can you say it is a decline and a fall? It is only facing life, meeting its problems from another angle, another point of view. You must know, for consciousness, the true consciousness —the consciousness of the psychic—glory and obscurity are the same, success and failure are the same. What is important is the growth of consciousness. Certain conditions which to your human eye appear favourable, may in reality be quite unfavourable for the growth of consciousness. With your ordinary thoughts and your ordinary reactions you judge everything according to success and failure. But that is the very last way of judging, for it is the most artificial, most superficial and absolutely contrary to truth. In human life, as it is organised at present, it is perhaps only once in a million cases, or even less than that, that truth is given the first place; always there is an element of show mixed up. When a man has success, much success, you may be sure there is mixed up with it as much show.

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