The Integral Yoga of Sri Aurobindo

CHAPTER IX

THE PSYCHIC—THE DELIGHT-SOUL

PART I

EVERY cosmic principle in our individual composition is. double: we have two bodies, two lives, two minds and two souls. They are derived from the involutionary and evolutionary movements of Spirit. We have a gross physical body, annamaya śarīra, and a subtle physical body, sūkṣma or linga, śarīra; a life-force working in our gross body and conditioned by its past evolution in Matter, and a sūkṣma or subliminal life, which is larger and more flexible, and not subject to the limitations of the former;, we have a surface mind of aspiring ignorance, chained to the ego and the desires, the appetites and normal reactions of the life and the body, and dominated and deluded by the senses, and a subliminal mind, which is wider and wiser, open to the universal mind and its movements, and full of intimations and inspirations from the higher planes of consciousness. Similarly, we have a double soul—the egoistic desire-soul in front, living in the disquieting illusion of a separate existence, and cut off from its source, which yet sustains and supports it from behind a veil, and the delight-soul or psyche, which dwells in the inmost sanctuary of our being, the immortal inhabitant of our

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mortal tenement. In the last essay we have seen what the desire-soul is and how, having helped the evolution of the mental being to a certain extent, having even led him to the frontiers of his consciousness and given him a glimpse of the infinite, stretching beyond, it yet stands as the greatest bar to his irrevocable self-transcendence. In the present essay I propose to study the delight-soul or the psychic, — its origin, essential nature, evolution, mission, aspiration and fulfilment.

THE PSYCHIC ENTITY

The psychic or the delight-soul is our eternal and essential individuality in Nature. It is made of love and bliss, .and is the very self of an immaculate purity. It comes from the Bliss-self of saccidānanda, as our mind comes from the vijnānamaya puruṣa or the Supramental Being, our life from the cit-tapas, and our body from the sat or the eternal divine Substance. In the beginning of our terrestrial evolution, this soul or psychic entity remains veiled behind the turbid working of our surface nature. It exerts its influence from behind and prepares its instruments of manifestation. It is the one thing in us that is imperishable, and "nothing that enters into our experience can pollute its purity or extinguish the flame." It has a direct, spontaneous perception of truth and beauty and goodness, and an infallible sense of the unity and harmony of things. "This veiled psychic entity is the flame of the Godhead always alight within us, inextinguishable

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even by that dense unconsciousness of any spiritual self within which obscures our outward nature. It is a flame born out of the Divine and, luminous inhabitant of the Ignorance, grows in it till it is able to turn it towards the Knowledge. It is the concealed Witness and Control, the hidden Guide, the Daemon of Socrates, the inner light or inner voice of the mystic...." "It is... untouched by death, decay or corruption....It is...the true original Conscience in us deeper than the constructed and conventional conscience of the moralist, for it is this which points always towards Truth and Right and Beauty, towards Love and Harmony and all that is a divine possibility in us, and persists till these things become the major need of our nature."¹ The psychic entity contains all possibilities of our manifestation, but is always superior to them. It is neither limited by its manifestation nor ever exhausted by it.

The seat of the psychic in us is behind the heart. It is the individual spark-soul supporting the evolution of our mind, life and body in the material world. It is full of love and devotion for the Divine, and aflame with an aspiration for the manifestation of His Grace and Glory in terrestrial nature. It is the child of the divine Mother' descended into the evolutionary experience, and immediately, intimately aware of Her Will in itself.

¹The Life Divine, by Sri Aurobindo—Vol. I, Chapter XIII.

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THE JIVA OR JIVATMA

It is better to note here that Sri Aurobindo uses the term Jiva or Jivâtmâ in a sense which is different from that generally attached to it in Indian philosophy. The current connotation of the word is the embodied soul, which passes from life to life and whose liberation from the meshes of Nature or Maya or Karma is the salvation so strenuously sought after. But this connotation is indefinite and incomplete, as it leaves the origin and swabhāva (essential nature) of the soul and the purpose of its descent into birth unexplained, and rather obscure. As in everything else, Sri Aurobindo's description and differentiation of the Jivâtmâ, the psychic entity and the psychic being are characterised by a clarity and precision remarkably rare outside the province of science, and reveal the three aspects of the same reality in such a way that the various spiritual realisations of them fall into their proper places without creating the confusion which not unoften bewilder the beginners on the path.

According to Sri Aurobindo,—and he is here at one with the Gita—it is the supreme Mother, the parā prakṛti, who has become all these numberless Jivâtmâ, these multiple centres of the one transcendent and universal Consciousness—parā prakṛtirjīvabhūtā. Each Jiva or Jivâtmâ is an individual Self in conscious union with the Transcendent and the Universal. It does not descend .into evolution, but presides from above over the evolution of the psychic entity, which is its self-projection or

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representative in the material world. The Jivâtmâ is our eternal and central being, untouched by the mutations of our nature and unqualified by the varying forms assumed by our evolving soul here. It also projects a Purusha, a representative of itself on each plane of our consciousness—a manomaya puruṣa in the mind, a prāṇamaya puruṣa in the vital, and an annamaya puruṣa in the physical—and exercises an ultimate coordinating control, subject to the Will of the Divine, over the various parts and activities of our nature. These Purushas are the instrumental, while the psychic is the central, self- projection of the Jivâtmâ. When the psychic is awake and evolved in our being, it widens its individuality and rises into union with the Jivâtmâ. This union gives the psychic the experience of its own universality and its oneness with all in the cosmic Divine; and through this experience of the universal it can pass on into the embrace of the Transcendent.

THE PSYCHIC BEING

The psychic entity, which is at first an undifferentiated power of the divine Consciousness, the immaculate, in- extinguishable spark-soul, as Sri Aurobindo calls it, puts forth and develops its individuality in the nature,—its representative central Purusha, the psychic being. The subtle distinction between the psychic entity and the psychic being has to be clearly grasped. "The psychic

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being is...the soul (the spark-soul or the psychic entity) of the individual evolving in the manifestation the individual Prakriti and taking part in the evolution. It is that spark of the Divine Fire that grows behind the mind» vital and physical as the psychic being until it is able to transform the Prakriti of Ignorance into Prakriti of Knowledge."¹ It is the Antarâtmâ or Chaitya Purusha, as distinguished from the Jivâtmâ, of which it is an evolving delegate here. As the Jivâtmâ is our central being above manifestation or evolution, so the psychic being is our central being in evolution. In the Integral Yoga of Sri Aurobindo the importance of the psychic being is of an immense practical nature, as we shall presently see. Nothing substantial and abiding can be achieved in this Yoga without the opening of the psychic being and its self- infusion into the parts of our nature. The psychicisation of our being is regarded as the first solid achievement upon which the later attainments and conquests can be securely based. Our normal human nature would never care to turn to the Divine or the Eternal, were it not for the occult influence of the psychic. Whenever there is an aspiration for the Infinite, for a transcendence of the ego and its inherent limitations, for the essential unity and harmony underlying the divisions and discords of the surface appearances; whenever the heart aches for the bliss ineffable, or the mind thirsts for the knowledge illimitable, it is the psychic being that has been at work,

¹ On Yoga-II by Sri Aurobindo.

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purifying and preparing the nature and turning it to the Love and Light of the Divine. When the being is obsessed with the superficies of existence and its passing interests, and has not developed the finer perception of any higher values and supersensuous realities, any refined aesthesis and sensibilities; when it wallows in the material life and its crude amenities, or even makes its mental powers and faculties subserve the ends of material life, it means that the psychic in it has not awakened—the being is still wandering through a spiritual night. The psychic being has an infallible discrimination,—it can immediately tell the true from the false, the beautiful from the ugly, the good from the evil, and the divine from the undivine. when it is fully awake and in control of the nature, spiritual life becomes a triumphal progress from light to light on a surge of developing joy and power. It is the psychic alone that can give the readiest response to the divine call, and offer all itself for the fulfilment of the divine Will. Its love and devotion and self-surrender to the Divine are as unstinted and spontaneous as the ego's devotion and self-giving to its mundane pursuits. The psychic being is the temple of the Divine in us, and it is because of it that even the vilest man, the most confirmed sinner sometimes feels a qualm and a contrition, and lifts up his eyes to Heaven for a ray of light, a redeeming touch of Grace. It is because of the psychic that even the hardened heart of a criminal sometimes melts, and the hand that rises to strike falls limp with pain and pity. "It is always this psychic being that is the real, though often the secret,

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cause of man's turning to the spiritual life and his greatest help in it."¹

THE MISSION AND ASPIRATION OF THE PSYCHIC

What is the mission of the psychic ? Why does it descend into human birth? This is a moot problem of religion and philosophy, and upon its solution depend the meaning and purpose of human life, if it is conceded that man has a soul. Buddhism denies the existence of any soul or immortal entity subsisting in the midst of the cosmic flood; therefore, for it there is no meaning or purpose in human life except to dissolve it into its constituent elements and have done with it,—done with the desire it generates and the suffering it entails. And the Buddhistic compassion beckons man out of the life of suffering into the silence of the Void, or the fathomless peace of the Permanent, beyond the swirl of sanskaras. For life its only message is one of sudden or gradual extinction. Christianity regards life as a long probation and preparation, and counsels its adherents to lay up for themselves "treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust doth corrupt, and whence thieves do not break through nor steal". Its kingdom of heaven upon earth is a moral kingdom of piety and charity, the reward of which can only be reaped in heaven. If rebirth is denied, the soul has only one human life, the present, petty, precarious span of three-score and ten,

¹ Letters of Sri Aurobindo—Vol. I.

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to do whatever it can, to be "raised up at the last day." The earthly life is used as a vaulting board, and not as a vehicle for the outpouring of the divine splendour. In the ascetic schools of Vedânta, life is looked down upon as a lie or a snare or a colossal hoax, from which flight is the only wisdom. They do not care to ask themselves why the soul has come down at all and got enmeshed in this life, and whether there is any purpose behind it. Vaishnavism contemplates the world as the lilâ or play of the All-Beloved and All-Beautiful, but a lilâ that is mysterious, inscrutable, baffling, and without any definite issue, and the Bhakta tends to withdraw from it in order to enjoy an unbroken continuity of the inner union. In almost all religions and philosophies there is a curious confederacy of silence over the purpose of the soul's birth in the material world. To call the birth a fall explains nothing, unless you account for the fall and discover its rationale; for, surely in the divine dispensation of Providence, such a tremendous event could not have occurred as a mere chance or an inexplicable error.

Sri Aurobindo does not by-pass this momentous question. In fact, he makes the mission of the soul's birth the focal point of his theory of terrestrial evolution and manifestation. According to him, each soul or psychic is a centre of the multiple Divine, a centre that has descended into birth for the evolution of its inalienable divinity in an individual nature. It assumes birth in order to manifest the Divine in one of His individual aspects. If the World is not an illusion or an amorphous flux of chaotic

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possibilities, but a progressive self-expression or manifestation of the one omnipresent Reality, the Supreme Being, then the psychic is the conscious and co-operating medium of that manifestation. The very presence of the psychic beings in the material world is an indubitable proof, not only of the presence of the Divine here,-that is admitted by most theistic religions-but also of His Will to an eventual perfection in self-manifestation. The psychic is the living and immortal image of the divine individuality, and the means of multiplying diversity in unity. It is the one luminous point in man that proclaims the advent of the Eternal Sun.

"The aspiration of the psychic being is for the opening of the whole lower nature, mind, vital, body to the Divine, for the love and union with the Divine, for Its presence and power within the heart, for the transformation of the mind, life and body by the descent of the higher consciousness into this instrumental being and nature."¹ It is quite possible that, emphasising its tendency to peace and silence, the psychic may turn to the immutable Self and merge in its vast freedom and impersonality,-a consummation which it usually seeks when there is a contracting movement in spirituality, and a strong, almost compelling centripetal magnetism. But that is a truncated achievement in which the soul wins its freedom by an escape and an evasion of its God-given mission. Sri Ramakrishna had the wisdom to nip this tendency in

¹. Letter of Sri Aurobindo, - Vol. 1.

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Vivekânanda as soon as he perceived it, and turn him towards the fulfilment of his soul's mission. This exclusive tendency of the soul towards personal salvation or self-annihilation in the infinite, immutable existence is accentuated, if not superinduced, by the force of crystallised traditions in the subliminal as well as in the surface consciousness of the individual and the race, and it takes nothing short of a revolution in will and thought and aspiration to break these hard crystals and clear the passage for the full efflorescence of the psychic, which is a global turning, not only to the immobile Impersonal, but to the Supreme Being, inducing a quiet, unrelaxed insistence on the surrender and transformation of the nature for His perfect manifestation in the material world. The psychic has an innate, unquenchable aspiration for union with the Divine through love and self-giving, but the union that gives it the highest fulfilment and satisfaction is not a passive and partial, but a dynamic and integral Union,-a union which is self-revealing, self-reproducing, world-illumining; a union in the body and all its activities as much as in the heart and the mind and in the inner depths. It is to achieve this integral union and become a thrilled channel of the divine splendour in the material world that the soul descends into darkness and mortality; and this aspiration it infuses into its whole nature, little by little, till all unconsciousness, all obscurity, all disharmony, all separative egoism are transformed into a luminous consciousness and a harmonious, manifold unity. The aspiration of the psychic is for the victory of

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the Divine over death and darkness and division and discord, and His undisputed sovereignty over all earth, even as it is over all heaven.

THE OPENING OF THE PSYCHIC

There are two ways of opening the psychic: one is direct and comparatively easy, and the other indirect and rather difficult. The first comes by a simple and sincere concentration in the heart with a growing love and devotion for the Divine and an untiring self-dedication to His service. A constant thinking of the Divine, an unebbing flow of the heart's purest emotions to the Supreme Lover, and an unflagging self-offering to His Force in every part of the being are a great help to the opening of the psychic being and its coming to the front. But all this movement of love and devotion and dedication, to be fully and swiftly effective, must proceed on the quiet basis of a consciousness that knows itself to be separate from its natural instruments and eternally belonging to the Divine. It is this consciousness that is the most decisive factor in the spiritual turning of a man. Some subtle intuitive perception, some inner vision or experience, some living faith and divination gives the start and serves as the germinating nucleus of the spiritual life. This tiny nucleus becomes the rock of safety against the blows and buffets of adverse forces. Deriving strength from the recondite sources, it grows and expands, annex­ing part after part of the being till all or most is retrieved

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from ignorance and egoism, and surrendered to the Divine. This initial glimpse or experience is the sign of the awakening of the psychic, and what one has to do is to sustain and fortify it by an increasing aspiration for the Divine and a surrender to His Supreme Force, the Mother. But a mere awakening of the psychic being is not all that we understand by the term opening. The opening of the psychic being means its coming to the front and its progressive control over the nature. It means that the love and devotion and surrender, which are natural and spontaneous in the psychic, begin to infect the other parts of the being, so that the mind may turn its thoughts to the Divine and seek to know and under­stand His Will; the heart may turn its emotions to the Divine and seek its highest satisfaction, its termless delight in loving and adoring Him and Him alone, in Himself and in all; and the life and the body find their completest fulfilment in serving Him and accomplishing His purpose in the world. The opening of the psychic being implies a developing control and co-ordination of the parts of our nature and their detailed and exhaustive consecration to the Divine. An unwavering concentra­tion in the heart, a quiet but intense aspiration for the Divine, a call and reliance on the Mother's Grace, a renunciation of desire and attachment and egoism, and a growing spontaneity in devotion and surrender, are the most potent means for the opening of the psychic.

The second way of opening is "the descent of the higher consciousness through the mind". The higher

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consciousness, descending from above, releases the heart-centre and opens the psychic. This happens in cases in which the emotional being is not much developed, and the mind has taken the lead in the sâdhanâ. But by whichever way it comes, the psychic opening is a sine qua non of the liberation and supramental perfection of our integral being.

PART II

THE REALISATION OF THE PSYCHIC

"CONCENTRATE in the heart. Enter into it; go within and deep and far, as far as you can. Gather all the strings of your consciousness that are spread abroad, roll them up and take a plunge and sink down.

"A fire is burning there, in the deep quietude of the heart. It is the divinity in you—your true being. Hear its voice, follow its dictates.¹

In these few packed words the Mother outlines the most rapidly effective way of realising the psychic. A sincere, intense aspiration and an unflagging concentration in the depths of our being, shutting out the unending clamours and conflicts of the outer members,

¹ Words of The Mother.

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is the royal road. But it must be a loving aspiration and a loving and living concentration, not a routine, mechanical exercise,—a joyous progress through constant devotion and self-giving. Two things which greatly help this progress are: (I) calm and equality and (2) a growing, spontaneous discontent with the normal round of life with its petty aims and puerile struggles, its fixed grooves of narrow ideas and recurrent thoughts, and its ravaging desires and heaving reactions. The more we seek for the soul, the more we come to feel the customary atmosphere of our self-centred existence as positively boring and suffocating. And seeking and longing for the soul, we advance, step by firm step, through the long, dim passage of our inner being till, one day, as the Mother says, the passage suddenly dissolves in a splendour of light, or a door swings open upon a flaming Presence, or it is a well or abyss of dazzling effulgence in which we find ourselves. It is an experience unlike any that ever takes place in our ordinary life, unlike any that even the sharpest human mind can ever conceive or imagine. It is an experience in a new dimension of being, in an unaccustomed ether of existence. It is an experience that changes the very stuff and texture of our deeper consciousness, and leaves an indelible mark even upon the outer. Once we have it, be it even for a fleeting moment, we know what we are in our essence—infinite and immortal; and we receive, as it were, a fire-baptism in that luminous infinity and immortality. And we also know, not by the thought or idea of the mind, or the feeling or emotion of our

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human heart, but by something much deeper and elemental in our being,—an immediate, intimate sense, an indubitable, mystical perception, an impalpable light, which is the very grain of our consciousness—that we are not the struggling and suffering creatures of Nature we seem to be. An unimaginable purity, an unstirring calm of eternity possess us in their ineffable sweetness. A veil has been lifted, a long-cherished illusion has been dispelled for ever.

Another simultaneous experience, unless the psychic realisation be partial and incomplete, is that the flood- gates of our love and devotion for the Divine are flung wide open, and we feel an exclusive and ecstatic tension' towards Him. The tension, the turning has no alloy of the mental effort or the vital urge in it—it is an automatic turning, as natural as the turning of the sunflower towards the sun, and infinitely more ardent. Our soul seems to hunger and thirst only after Him, and recognise Him alone as the Master of our being, the sole reason of our existence. There is something so spontaneous, so sparklingly joyous in this love and self-giving that even aspiration seems to melt and disappear in a mute rapture of fulfilment, and all the chords of our being vibrate to the ecstasy of the divine touch.

The third concomitant experience, or more precisely, the third strand of the total indivisible experience, is an unutterable sense of release, a tremendous relief, from the gnawing cares of the life of ignorance. An abysmal peace sucks us in, and a tranquil silence envelops and embalms

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our repose. A serene eternity, in which there is no succession of quivering moments, and a radiant unity, unwounded by division, cradle and sustain our soul in that transporting bliss of self-realisation.

These three experiences together constitute the psychic realisation in its essence; but in the case of each individual, it has usually a colour and a rhythm characteristic of his individuality and the peculiar nature of his aspiration. But it is quite possible, as I have said above, that the being, emphasising the peace and silence of the realisation, and revelling in the calm passivity of its freedom, may turn altogether towards the immobility of the impersonal Self or Spirit, and seek to blot itself out in it. But that is a rather narrow and exclusive orientation, happily becoming a less common eventuality than before. The incipient expansiveness of the spiritual impulse in modern humanity presupposes a widening of aspiration and presages a very comprehensive fulfilment—a dynamic and integral union with the Divine, and not a mere merger in the silent immutability of His impersonal existence. The aspiration with which the Integral Yoga starts is such an inclusive and embracing aspiration, which seeks to harmonise and unify all the aspects of the supreme Reality in the most comprehensive spiritual realisation. Sri Aurobindo does not countenance the escapist aspiration of the soul towards the blank peace or the silent void of the unconditioned Vast, as will be evident from the following quotation from the third book of his epic, Savitri':

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A stillness absolute, incommunicable,

Meets the sheer self-discovery of the soul;

A wall of stillness shuts it from the world,

A gulf of stillness swallows up the sense

And makes unreal all that mind has known,

All that the labouring senses still would weave

Prolonging an imaged unreality.

Self's vast spiritual silence occupies space;

Only the Inconceivable is left,

Only the Nameless without space and time:

.Abolished is the burdening need of life:

Thought falls from us, we cease from joy and grief;

The ego is dead; we are free from being and care,

We have done with birth and death and work and fate.

O soul, it is too early to rejoice!

Thou hast reached the boundless silence of the Self,

Thou hast leaped into a glad divine abyss;

But where hast thou thrown self's mission and self's power?

On what dead bank on the Eternal's road?

One was within thee who was self and world,

What hast thou done for his purpose in the stars?

Escape brings not the victory and the crown!

Something thou cam'st to do from the Unknown,

But nothing is finished and the world goes on,

Because only half God's cosmic work is done.

*

* *

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A black veil has been lifted; we have seen

The mighty shadow of the omniscient Lord;

But who has lifted up the veil of light

And who has seen the body of the King?

*

* *

A large white line has figured as a goal,

But far beyond the ineffable sun-tracts blaze.

What seemed^the source and end was a wide gate,

A last bare step into eternity.

An eye has opened upon timelessness,

Infinity takes back the forms it gave,

And through God's darkness or his naked light

His million rays return into the Sun.

There is a zero sign of the Supreme;

Nature left nude and still uncovers God.

But in her grandiose nothingness all is there:

When her strong garbs are torn away from us,

The soul's ignorance is slain but not the soul

The zero covers an immortal face.

A high and black negation is not all,

A huge extinction is not God's last word,

Life's ultimate sense, the close of being's course,

The meaning of this great mysterious world.

In absolute silence sleeps an absolute Power.

Awaking, it can wake the trance-bound soul

And in the ray reveal the parent sun :

It can make the world a vessel of Spirit's force,

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It can fashion in the clay God's perfect shape.

To free the self is but one radiant pace;

Here to fulfil himself was God's desire.

* * *

I have appended this long and luminous extract and dwelt on the escapist tendency of the soul both in this and the previous essay, because, next to surrender to the Mother, the nature and quality of the aspiration is the most important factor determining the direction and culminating perfection of the Integral Yoga of Sri Aurobindo. The initial aspiration of our being, as it turns towards the Infinite and Eternal, contains, like a seed, the full potentiality of the future efflorescence. If the integral, dynamic union with the Divine is the aim, as it is in the Integral Yoga, then there must be, in the aspiration with which one starts on the path, something like a prescience or fore- shadowing of it. The beginning must betray, to the eye that can observe, the dim contours of the distant end. The Integral Yoga cannot be pursued to its glorious consummation by those who have any exclusive leaning towards personal salvation, or the vast peace and silence of the immutable Self.

EXPERIENCE AND VISION

The realisation of the psychic or the soul, as described above, is an experience which operates a basic change in a

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great part of our consciousness, and from which we never return the same as we were when we entered into it. It is felt as a new birth, a revolutionary reversal of our normal poise, and an opening up of mysterious horizons. Its effect is, therefore, far-reaching and abiding. But a vision is a different thing. It is seeing and knowing rather than being and becoming. There are, it is true, certain visions which produce a considerable change in us, or leave an ineffaceable imprint upon our being and nature, but they are more an exception than a rule,—and even they do not possess the power to transform our consciousness. Sometimes it happens that a vision is followed by an experience; in that case, whatever change or transformation takes place in us should be attributed to the experience, and not to the vision. Besides, there are visions and visions, and one must be able to tell the true from the false.

Let us take an outstanding example of a vision of the soul and its eternal Master dwelling in it. Suso, the Western mystic, once saw a vision of angels and, as Dean Inge describes it, "besought one of them to show him the manner of God's secret dwelling in the soul. An angel answered, 'Cast then a joyous glance into thyself and see how God plays His play of love with thy loving soul.' He looked immediately, and saw that his body over his heart was as clear as crystal; and that in the centre was sitting tranquilly, in lovely form, the eternal Wisdom, beside whom sat, full of heavenly longing, the servitor's own soul, which leaning lovingly towards God's side, and encircled by His arms, lay pressed close to His heart."

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It is a beautiful vision, as illuminating as enrapturing; but it is evidently mixed with Suso's mental constructions, and cast and garbed in his mental symbols.¹ It must have produced a considerable effect upon him, but an effect bearing more directly upon his mind and heart than upon the deepest layers of his consciousness, as the pictorial representation and the detached visual perception clearly testify. But an experience is neither a representation nor a detached perception—it is a realisation by identification, a knowing by being, an obliteration of the subject-object duality in the perfect osmosis of union. And yet, baffling all mental understanding, a rapturous relation of love persists in the heart of that union. A vision, if it is not very powerful, may, in course of time, and particularly if life is forced in a contrary direction, fade away from the mind, or remain only as a vapid memory in the remote background of one's consciousness; but an experience is a guest that never departs—it has come to stay and and conquer and possess. "A vision is a vision," says the Mother, "but an experience is a gift."

THE PSYCHIC ATTITUDE IN ACTION

The true psychic attitude is one of blissful love and unstinted self-giving. It is polarised to the Divine, but this polarity is not exclusive, it is all-inclusive. The light of consciousness and the force of consciousness being,

¹These symbols and. constructions are usually subconscious.

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unlike as in our mind, one and indivisible in the fully awakened psychic being, the stress of its personality is at once towards the ecstasy of the divine union and the perfect expression of that union in its terrestrial nature. The sole self-sufficing delight of the psychic is in the Divine and in the fulfilment of His Will in the world. Fully conscious of the reason of its existence, it does not count it a sacrifice to forgo even the highest ecstasy of a rapt union with the Divine for the sake of accomplishing His work and promoting His manifestation. It is a mistake to think that the soul or the psychic seeks only the absorbed bliss of the divine union and has a natural aversion to the world and its activities.¹ That seeking, as we have already seen, is an intense but exclusive trend, not the whole tenor of its being and consciousness. "You may think, my daughters," says St. Teresa, "that the soul in her state of union should be so absorbed that she can occupy herself with nothing. You deceive yourselves. She turns with greater ease and ardour than before to all that which belongs to the service of God, and when these occupations leave her free again, she remains in the enjoyment of that companionship."

But where shall we look for the most perfect illustrations of the true psychic poise, the true psychic attitude, the mysterious persistence of the rapturous relation of the psychic love and devotion in the midst of a rapt

¹There is always a mental or vital alloy in such a one-sided seeking.

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divine union, the psychic control and transformation of nature, and the unwearied insistence on service, on the perfect fulfilment of the divine Will and the manifestation of the supernal glory of the Divine upon earth, except in the Prayers and Meditations of the Mother ?

THE PSYCHIC POISE

The essential psychic poise is one of perfect peace and equality. The psychic does not so much seek after the Divine as see and feel and enjoy Him. Its aspiration is a pure flame, calm and unwavering, that rises straight towards its eternal Beloved, It knows no flurry or flutter, but is serenely firm in its trust in the Divine. If love and delight are the very stuff of its being, peace is its foundation, and an infinite patience the rhythm of its intensity. This poise of peace and patience is beautifully illustrated in the following Prayer of the Mother:

"In Peace and Silence the Eternal manifests; allow nothing to disturb you and the Eternal will manifest; have perfect equality in face of all and the Eternal will be there....Yes, we should not put too much intensity,¹ too much effort into our seeking for Thee, the effort and intensity become a veil in front of Thee: we must not desire to see Thee, for that is still a mental agitation which obscures Thy Eternal Presence, it is in the most complete

¹It is mental or vital intensity that is meant here.

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Peace, Serenity and Equality that all is Thou even as Thou art all, and the least vibration in this perfectly pure and calm atmosphere is an obstacle to Thy manifestation. No haste, no inquietude, no tension; Thou, nothing but Thou, without any analysis or any objectivising, and Thou art there without a possible doubt, for all becomes a Holy Peace and a Sacred Silence.

"And that is better than all the meditations in the world."¹

THE PSYCHIC LOVE

The psychic love is a radiant flower of identity, and yet in the very heart of identity it maintains a mysterious relation of love and devotion with the Divine; for, if it merged in the Divine and His Love, the psychic individuality would be abolished, and abolished with it the very means of divine manifestation in the world. This subtle duality in the midst of the closest unity is very sweetly brought out in the Mother's Prayer of May 21, 1914 :—

"Outside all manifestation, in the immutable silence of Eternity, I am in Thee, O Lord, an unmoving beatitude. In that which, out of Thy puissance and marvellous light, forms the centre and reality of the atoms of Matter I find Thee; thus without going out of Thy Presence I can disappear in Thy supreme consciousness or see

¹ Prayers and Meditations of the Mother, Dec. 5, 1912.

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Thee in the radiant particles of my being. And for the moment that is the plenitude of Thy life and Thy illumination.

"I see Thee, I am Thyself, and between these two poles my intense love aspires towards Thee”.

The Mother has identified herself with the Divine both in His transcendence and in His universal immanence, she has become one with Him, Himself, and yet she sees Him; and between these two poles, her psychic love aspires for Him. This duality in unity, this difference in identity, incomprehensible to the human mind, is a source of infinite bliss to the psychic, permitting, as it does, a constant union and communion, without which the psychic mission of manifesting the Divine would not be possible.

The psychic love is a constant oblation and an unfailing incentive to service. It wants nothing for itself—it is a flame that is content only to burn. "O Lord, I am before Thee as an offering ablaze with the burning fire of divine Union..."¹ It seeks only the pleasure of the Divine, the fulfilment of His Will and the deployment of His Love and Light upon earth. Its essential aspiration is to spend itself in God's service, but this service is not any mentally conceived work, altruistic or humanitarian, done in a spirit of disinterestedness; it is becoming a flexible and iridescent instrument for the perfect self-

¹ Prayers and Meditations of the Mother.

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expression of the Divine. In her Prayer of the 27th July, 1914, the Mother prays to the Divine:—

"Let me lie down at Thy feet, merge into Thy heart, disappear in Thee, be blotted out in Thy beatitude; or rather be solely Thy servitor without pretending to anything else. I do not desire or aspire to anything more, I wish only to be Thy servitor."

It is interesting to note the ascending scale of the aspiration, which, starting from "lying down at Thy feet", rises, step by step, through merging in His heart, disappearing in Him, and—this is the traditional climax—being blotted out in His beatitude, to the superb pitch of a total holocaust—wishing "only to be Thy servitor"! Nothing can reveal better the essentially sacrificial nature of the psychic love than this high-souled aspiration of the Mother.

PART III

THE ODYSSEY OF THE PSYCHIC BEING

We have already had an understanding of the rationale of the soul's descent into material birth: it is to awaken consciousness in the giant nescience of the material existence, and effect a dynamic union between Spirit and Matter, rendering the latter a plastic and transparent

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medium of the Spirit's multiple self-expression. But this stupendous evolutionary work cannot obviously be done in a single birth of the soul—the nature that emerges from Matter and develops through life and mind is much too dense and dark, much too inert and ignorant and frail and peccable to be lifted up at once to the divine stature. It has to be prepared,—its complex strands and elements to be purified, refined, impersonalised, integrated and organised round the central divine Presence. It is this long work of preparation that is done through the series of births of the individual soul. If a fulfilment was sought elsewhere than on this earth, this series of births would not impose itself; but if the earth is to be the scene of the highest divine fulfilment, as Sri Aurobindo holds, then a succession of rebirths in the human form seems to be the only possible means to it. But, it must be carefully noted, this succession of rebirths is not a machinery of repetition of the same personality. John, dead, is not born again, with his old nature and character unchanged, as Jack. If it were so, rebirth would be no means of evolution, but only a perpetuation of the same personality in different physical garbs. The logic of evolution, if we subscribe to it, demands, on the contrary, that each birth must mark a definite step forward, a bringing out of that which was involved or latent, , and a working out of some of the complex potentialities of the evolving individual. It is true that this evolutionary advance cannot be in a straight line; it is necessarily in a spiral. Now it is one group of elements that are caught

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up in its movement, now it is another; a part of the being is raised into light and another left tossing in darkness; and the part that is lifted in one life is dropped in another to work out some of its submerged or suppressed tendencies. It is an incalculable, winding movement, unhasting but unresting, aiming at thoroughness and harmony, though appearing to drive only towards stray, specific results.

But how is this evolution effected, and under what agency is it led from stage to stage? If John is born immediately after his death as Jack, he can only remain what he was in his previous life—the mere fact of the assumption of a new physical form does not of itself argue any modification of the psychological make-up of his being. According to Sri Aurobindo, this agency is the psychic being, and its internatal odyssey is the process by which it rings the curtain up and down upon the decisive stages of the evolution of its nature. Death is only a signal, may be an abrupt and violent signal in a majority of cases, for a shift of scenes, and nothing more. When the gross physical body drops, the being passes into the subtle physical, and from there into the vital world. It exhausts its vital Karma in the vital world, and then passes on into the mental. When the mental formations are dissolved, like those of the vital, the soul goes to its own plane, called by Sri Aurobindo the psychic plane, for rest and assimilation of all its past experiences, acquired both on earth and on the planes of Us post-mortal journey. When the period of rest is over,

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and the work of assimilation complete, the soul or the psychic being emerges from its plane and assumes again, first, a mental sheath, that is to say, a mental body cornposed of those mental elements which it attracts towards itself by the characteristic force of its personality for the work of its next incarnation. Then it descends to the vital plane and, assuming an appropriate vital sheath, comes down through the subtle-physical into human birth. This is the general process, but it admits of many variations, some of which we may glance at in this essay.

The process seems to be simple enough, but unless we know the principle behind it, governing its purpose and functioning, we shall miss its real significance, and rest satisfied with a mechanistic view of it. There are two factors of the most primary and decisive importance to be be taken into account in this connection. The one is the evolution of the psychic being from Matter upwards, following a certain curve of developing consciousness and nature; and the other is a particular line of divine consciousness influencing and guiding from above the evolution of the psychic being, and using its transient surface formations to further its own ulterior aim of self- manifestation in Matter. This particular line of divine consciousness, at once transcendent, universal and individual, seeks its perfect self-expression on earth through the psychic being, which is its projection here, and is the ultimate reason and justification of the whole complex process of the rebirth and the internatal journey of the psychic being. It follows naturally from

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a consideration of these two factors that rebirth is an evolutionary necessity and not a mere mechanism of Karma from which the soul has to escape into the immutable eternity of its unconditioned existence or non-existence. But for rebirth, the soul, instead of evolving into the mental consciousness of the human being, would have remained a perpetual prisoner of the subconscient obscurity; and if it ever rises from the mental twilight into the solar glory of the infinite supermind and reveals that glory in earthly life, as it seems destined to do (unless it elects to beat an oblique retreat), it can only be by the process of rebirth and the full utilisation of the opportunities rebirth makes accessible to it. The whole problem changes its aspect when viewed from the standpoint of evolution. The traditional idea subjects rebirth to the rigid determinism of the chain of causality, and regards it as a bondage and burden of the soul, from which an escape is the only release; while, according to Sri Aurobindo, rebirth is the only means of evolution and liberation, and once they are achieved, it becomes a means of divine self-expression and immortal enjoyment of unity in diversity—sambhūtyāmṛtamaśnute, as the Upanishads say. The liberated soul, the Jivanmukta, does not shrink from assuming any number of births for the fulfilment of the divine Will;—each birth of such a soul is, indeed, an invasion of light into the terrestrial darkness and an infusion of bliss into the mortal suffering.

The particular line of divine consciousness influencing and directing the evolution of the individual being is then

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an important determining factor. This influence and direction come down to the evolving individual through the subliminal, and are rather occult to his unenlightened comprehension. If he lives mostly in his physical being, engrossed in the needs and cravings of his body and attached to his physical interests and relations, it is likely that his soul will not be able to go on a long journey of the supraphysical planes after the death of his present body,—the insistent material preoccupation of the nature will pull it down to earth. But if he has sufficiently developed his vital being and the mental; if he has, consciously or subconciously, developed an affinity with any of the supraphysical worlds, his post-mortal sojourn in that world becomes almost a certainty. Take, for instance, the case of a philosopher. After his death he passes through the subtle-physical to the vital world, and unless there is a strong vital knot or twist somewhere in him, some deep-rooted desire or passion, his vital sheath will soon be dissolved, and he will procceed straight to the mental world where, relieved of the vital burden, he will be free to acquire various experiences. Because he has developed a mind of reflection and imagination, and an affinity with the mental world, be can live in that world more or less securely and fruitfully till the mental sheath is dissolved and the soul or the psychic being departs to its own plane to rest and assimilate its past experiences. It must be noted that the psychic being carries only the quintessence of its experiences to its abode of rest, having discarded and exhausted on the way much that was

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necessary in its own time but irrelevant to the future set-up god growth, and it is this quintessence that goes, along with the new factors emerging into existence, to condition the shape and pattern of its next birth. But what are these new factors? They are the different lines of evolution that the psychic being takes up for development in its successive births. For, the psychic being is not bound by the chain of causality; it is the determining agent, in union with the divine Will in it, of the purpose and processes of its incarnations. It freely accepts the conditions and inherent limitations of the material life and the risks and hazards of its journey through the supraphysical planes to work out the tangled complex of possibilities without which the many-sided perfection and fulfilment of its destiny cannot be achieved.

Another thing to be marked here is that, as, on the one hand, the evolution of the psychic being is not the result of a mechanical interaction of karmic forces, so, on the other, it is not an isolated phenomenon unrelated to the universal being and its evolution. The evolutionary development has "a universal as well as an individual aspect: the Universal develops the grades of its being and the ordered variation of the universality of itself in the series of its evolved forms of being; the individual soul follows the line of this cosmic series and manifests what is prepared in the universality of the Spirit. The universal Man, the cosmic Purusha in humanity, is developing in the human race the power that has grown into humanity from below it and shall yet grow to supermind

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and spirit and become the Godhead in man who is aware of his true integral self and the divine universality of his nature. The individual must have followed this line of development; he must have presided over a soul- experience in the lower forms of life before he took up the human evolution: as the One was capable of assuming in its universality these lower forms of the plant and the animal, so must the individual, now human, have been capable of assuming them in his previous stages of experience. He now appears as a human soul, the Spirit accepting the inner and outer form of humanity, but he is not limited by this form any more than he was limited by the plant or animal forms previously assumed by him; he can pass on from it to a greater self-expression in a higher scale of Nature."¹

This seems to be a striking departure from the accredited theories of rebirth. Sri Aurobindo stresses two important points in this connection—points which have been curiously ignored up to now. The first is that the evolution of the individual is not an isolated movement following its own separate lines and sufficient unto itself. If Karma is one or Prakriti is one or the stream of flux is an indivisible universal dynamism, then there must be an interpenetration and interaction of their energies, precluding the possibility of any strict individual insularity. In this world of teeming relativities, subsisting in the Absolute, no single unit is sufficient unto itself,

¹ The Life Divine by Sri Aurobindo—Book II. Chapter XX.

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but all are divergent and convergent parts of the whole,. acting and reacting upon one another, and developing by this mutual interaction. The Karma of an individual is not altogether his own exclusive concern, of which he alone reaps the harvest of corn or thorns; it is also the concern of the universal Being who, using the individual as one of His myriad channels of self-expression, exercises a presiding and directing control over his evolution. If the philosophy of Karma and rebirth is to be properly studied, it cannot be done except in the larger context of universal karma and universal manifestation. The second point of importance is that while, according to the current interpretations of Karma, rebirth comes to an end as soon as the mental consciousness of the individual abolishes itself in the spiritual, Sri Aurobindo regards rebirth as a means of ascent into "a higher scale of Nature." The mind is not the highest degree of consciousness accessible to man on earth; there are higher degrees and levels hierarchically graded and leading to the supreme consciousness, to which man can attain without abolishing himself. And that is, indeed, the intended crown and culmination of his evolution through birth and death—the full and perfect recovery and revelation of the Spirit in him. His experiences in successive lives, in changing forms, in different and often difficult circumstances; his after-death journey to the various worlds of life and mind; his exploration of their powers and principles, and their bearing upon his own development and perfection; his soul's assimilative and

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preparative repose in its own world of peace and bliss- all these are but episodes in the long and chequered history of his soul's evolutionary progression from Matter to Spirit, its eventful odyssey. His humanity is a. shifting mask, an immaculate divinity is his eternal essence and ultimate destiny.

THE PSYCHIC PREDETERMINATION

When the soul or the psychic being comes out of its assimilative repose, it decides upon the nature and conditions of its next incarnation in the light of the will and knowledge it has of its immediate evolutionary objective. Every essential factor, whether it is the place and the environment, or the family and the circumstances of its birth, or the events and experiences it will pass through, or the forces it will meet and combat, is foreseen and fore-ordained by the psychic being in consonance with the divine Will in it. Suffering, defeat, humiliation, destitution as well as happiness and honour and success are equally accepted by the psychic being as part of the mixed material of its self-evolution in earthly nature. The psychic being has an equal delight in all the vicissitudes of its temporal existence, and it profits by each of them. It turns failures into successes and defeats into potential elements of victory. That is why even though crushed by the forces of life, we are not altogether crushed out of existence—something seems ever to sustain and uphold us. Even when we walk through the darkest

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night, a light, however dim, bums on within, and in the acutest agony of pain a hope of its end saves us from an utter collapse. The psychic being often accepts situations, which appear to be revolting or repellent to our mental or moral sense, in order to work out its manifestational possibilities. The human mind, tethered to its petty standards and concentrated on momentary interests, cannot fathom the direction of the psychic being and is, therefore, often perplexed or shocked by the turns events take in life. But if it can develop the spiritual vision, it will see that there is nothing like chance in life, no accidents,—everything is foreseen and predetermined by the Divine through the psychic, so far as the evolution of the human individual is concerned; and to be united with the psychic and live in it and from it is the only sun-lit path of progress for man.

THE PSYCHIC GUIDANCE

When spiritual knowledge develops, one begins to perceive that the proud idea of free-will which the human ego cherishes in its ignorance is nothing but a precious fiction. It is true that it is a practical and effective fiction, indispensable for the evolution of the individual in the ignorance, but one that has to be flung away as soon as he advances towards wider horizons, and is able to command a more or less clear view of the unity of universal existence and the sovereignty of the divine Will in it. This view does not reduce him to a helpless automaton, drained of

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all will and initiative, and moved by the fiat and force of an alien supremacy. On the contrary, it unites him with the universal existence and eventually even with the transcendent through an identification with his real soul, the psychic being. In that unconfined consciousness he discovers that the will of his ego was but a puppet will, drunk with the cramping illusion of its separate freedom, and that his true being is not encased in a tiny formation of Nature, but embraces the whole universe and extends even beyond it. He finds his own freedom in the freedom of the Infinite, and his own will in the self-effectuating Will of the Eternal.

The perception of the psychic guidance and an ungrudging surrender to it is the surest way of spiritual advancement. Much of the struggle of the spiritual life, much of the twisting and torturing of nature, much of the fantastic mortifications imposed upon the body and the life-energies, is due to a lack of direct guidance of the psychic being. The mind, taking the lead in the sadhana and straining to force the whole nature into its preconceived moulds, often ends by only maiming and disfiguring it. The excesses of asceticism have little of genuine spirituality in them—they are, more often than not, a gross willful violence upon oneself and upon the Divine in oneself. And it is not only the average men, but even some of the great spiritual personalities, that have been responsible for this kind of deliberate violence upon their nature under the arbitrary lead of their self-righteous mind. But a simple surrender to the psychic guidance in faith and sincerity obviates

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much of the difficulty of the path and makes of our evolution a spontaneous outflowering.

Here a note of caution seems to be called for. When we speak of the psychic guidance or the psychic leading, we do not mean the direction of what is called conscience. Conscience, as it is understood, is a mental and moral construction, a central crystallisation of the more or less conventional ideas of good and evil in the human mind. It is invariably coloured by the preferences and prepossessions of the mind, and, even at its best, cannot but reflect the dominant tendency of the being, though that tendency may not be apparent on the surface. To perceive the psychic guidance, one must have gone deep into oneself, beyond the mind and its ideas and principles, and the likes and dislikes of the heart. It is only in the serene silence of the mind and the heart, and not in their feverish striving, that the psychic guidance reveals itself. A purity in the being, attained by a renunciation of all desires and a clearance of all mental cobwebs, is the best condition for the still small voice to be heard and the slender revealing ray to be seen.

But even when we are not aware of the psychic guidance, it is always there behind the activities of our ego, but crossed, perverted and falsified by the egoistic misprision and interference. There is an evolutionary utility even in this distortion and falsification of the psychic guidance, entailing many a stumble and suffering, so long as the ego is the overt leader of the individual evolution,—the ego learns in the school of suffering and grows in strength by

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defeat and failure. But when the being has evolved enough to overleap the egoistic bounds, nothing is more helpful than a contact with the psychic and a surrender to its infallible guidance. Any insistence on the realisation of one's mental principles and conceptions would mean, at this stage, a definite retardation or a regression, not an advance.

THE SELF-EXPRESSION OF THE PSYCHIC BEING

A progressive surrender of the whole being to the guidance of the psychic, which means, in effect, a surrender to the Divine and His Shakti through the unerring agency of the psychic, leads to a more and more unflawed self- expression of our essential divinity in life. The psychic being comes forward and makes its presence felt in our mind, our heart, our will and even in our body, removing all impurities and preparing our nature for the manifestation of the Divine. The sway of the psychic being in our nature is a guarantee of peace and purity and love and joy, and when the parts of our nature are moulded into the image of the psychic, our life becomes a triumphal march to the Love and Light of the Supreme. A boundless love and devotion for the Divine, a complete self-consecration to His Will, a spontaneous love and sympathy for all beings, a concrete experience of the unity of all existence and a growing poise in that unity, a keen sense of beauty and harmony and a limpid placidity and plasticity

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in the entire nature, are some of the principal elements of the self-expression of the psychic being.

It may appear that this is the very summit of the soul's perfection; but in Sri Aurobindo's Yoga this psychic conversion and transformation of the nature is but the first decisive achievement, and beyond it lie the ascents and descents and conquests which culminate in an integral union with the Divine, and His manifestation upon earth. The Divine completes what the psychic being commences.

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