Divine,Mantra,Invocation,Music for soul
India, land of light and spiritual knowledge... Mother

 

Home | Political Writings and Thoughts | Invocation | Sri Krishna | AuroMusic | Hour of God | Mother India | Secrets of Veda

It is the action of the psychic being, not the being itself, that gets mixed with the mental, vital and physical disabilities because it has to use them to express what little of the true psychic feeling gets through the veil. It is by the heart's aspiration to the Divine that the psychic being gets free from these disabilities.

SRI AUROBINDO
Atman, Jivatman and the Psychic

The Mother and Sri Aurobindo

Ordinarily, all the more inward and all the abnormal psychological experiences are called psychic. I use the word psychic for the soul as distinguished from the mind and vital. All movements and experiences of the soul would in that sense be called psychic, those which rise from or directly touch the psychic being; where mind and vital predominate, the experience would be called psychological (surface or occult).


SRI AUROBINDO

The Spirit is the Atman, Brahman, Essential Divine.
  When the One Divine manifests its ever inherent multiplicity, this essential Self or Atman becomes for that manifestation the central being who presides from above over the evolution of its personalities and terrestrial lives here, but is itself an eternal portion of the Divine and prior to the terrestrial manifestation -para prakrtir jivabhuta.
  In this lower manifestation, apara prakrti, this eternal portion of the divine appears as the soul, a spark of the Divine Fire, supporting the individual evolution, supportting the mental, vital and physical being. The psychic being is the spark growing into a Fire, evolving with the growth of the consciousness. The psychic being is therefore evolutionary, not like the Jivatman prior to the evolution.
   But man is not aware of the self or Jivatman, he is aware only of his ego, or he is aware of the mental being which controls the life and the body. But more deeply he becomes aware of his soul or psychic being as his true centre, the Purusha in the heart; the psychic is the central being in the evolution, it proceeds from and represents the Jivatman, the eternal portion of the Divine. When there is the full consciousness, the Jivatman and the psychic being join together.


SRI AUROBINDO

 

The phrase "central being" in our yoga is usually applied to the portion of the Divine in us which supports all the rest and survives through death and birth. This central being has two forms -above it is Jivatman, our true being, of which we become aware when the higher self- knowledge comes, -below, it is the psychic being which stands behind mind, body and life. The Jivatman is above the manifestation in life and presides over it; the psychic being stands behind the manifestation in life and supports it.
  The natural attitude of the psychic being is to feel itself as the Child, the Son of God, the Bhakta; it is a portion of the Divine, one in essence, but in the dynamics of the manifestation there is always even in identity a difference. The Jivatman, on the contrary, lives in the essence and can merge itself in identity with the Divine; but it too, the moment it presides over the dynamics of the manifesta- tion, knows itself as one centre of the multiple Divine, not as the Parameshwara. It is important to remember the distinction; for, otherwise, if there is the least vital egoism, one may begin to think of oneself as an Avatar or lose balance like Hridaya with Ramakrishna.                

 SRI AUROBINDO

It is necessary to understand clearly the difference between the evolving soul (psychic being) and the pure Atman, self or spirit. The pure self is unborn, does not pass through death or birth, is independent of birth or body, mind or life or this manifested Nature. It is not bound by these things, not limited, not affected, even though it assumes and supports them. The soul, on the contrary, is something that comes down into birth and passes through death -although it does not itself die, for it is immortal- from one state to another, from the earth plane to other planes and back again to the earth-existence It goes on with this progression from life to life through al evolution which leads it up to the human state and evolve: through it all a being of itself which we call the psychic being that supports the evolution and develops a physical a vital, a mental human consciousness as its instruments o world-experience and of a disguised, imperfect, but growing self-expression. All this it does from behind a veil showing something of its divine self only in so far as thc imperfection of the instrumental being will allow it. But time comes when it is able to prepare to come out fron behind the veil, to take command and turn all the instru mental nature towards a divine fulfilment. This is the beginning of the true spiritual life. The soul is able now to make itself ready for a higher evolution of manifeste( consciousness than the mental human -it can pass fron the mental to the spiritual and through degrees of the spiritual to the supramental state. Till then there is no reason why it should cease from birth, it cannot in fact do so. If having reached the spiritual state, it wills to pass on of the terrestrial manifestation, it may indeed do so- but there is also possible a higher manifestation, in the Knowl edge and not in the Ignorance.


SRI AUROBINDO

The soul, representative of the central being, is a spark of the Divine supporting all individual existence in Nature the psychic being is a conscious form of that soul growing in the evolution -in the persistent process that develop! first life in Matter, mind in life, until finally mind can develop into overmind and overmind into the supramental Truth. The soul supports the nature in its evolutior through these grades, but is itself not any of these things
   The lower Nature, apara prakrti, is this external objective and superficial subjective apparent Nature which manifests all these minds, lives and bodies. The supreme Nature, para prakrti, concealed behind it is the very nature of the Divine -a supreme Consciousness-Force which manifests the multiple Divine as the Many. These Many are in themselves eternal selves of the Supreme in his supreme Nature, para prakrti. Here in relation to this world they appear as the Jivatmas supporting the evolution of the natural existences, sarva-bhittani, in the mutable Becoming which is the life of the Kshara (mobile or mutable) Purusha. The Jiva (or Jivatma) and the creatures, sarva-bhittani, are not the same thing. The Jivatmas really stand above the creation even though concerned in it; the natural existences, sarva-bhutani, are the creatures of Nature. Man, bird, beast, reptile are natural existences, but the individual Self in them is not even for a moment characteristically man, bird, beast or reptile; in its evolution it is the same through all these changes, a spiritual being that consents to the play of Nature.
          What is original and eternal for ever in the Divine is the Being, what is developed in consciousness, conditions, forces, forms, etc. , by the Divine Power is the Becoming. The eternal Divine is the Being; the universe in Time and all that is apparent in it is a Becoming. The eternal Being in its superior nature, Para Prakriti, is at once One and Many; but the eternal Multiplicity of the Divine when it stands behind the created existences, sarva-bhutani, appears as (or as we say, becomes) the Jiva, para prakrtir fivabhitta. In the psychic, on the other hand, there are two aspects, the psychic existence or soul behind and in front the form of individuality it takes in its evolution in Nature.
The soul or psyche is immutable only in the sense that it contains aIl the possibilities of the Divine within it, but it has to evolve them and in its evolution it assumes the form of a developing psychic individual evolving in the manifestation the individual Prakriti and taking part in the evolution. It is the spark of the Divine Fire that grows behind the mind, vital and physical by means of the psychic being until it is able to transform the Prakriti of Ignorance into a Prakriti of Knowledge. This evolving psychic being is not therefore at any time all that the soul or essential psychic existence bears within it; it temporalises and individualises what is eternal in potentiality, transcendent in essence, in this projection of the spirit.
  The cental being is the being which presides over the different births one after the other, but is itself unborn, for it does not descend into the being but is above it -it holds together the mental, vital and physical being and all the various parts of the personality and it controls the life either through the mental being and the mental thought and will or through the psychic, whichever may happen to be most in front or most powerful in nature. If it does not exercise its control, then the consciousness is in great disorder and every part of the personality acts for itself so that there is no coherence in the thought, feeling or action.
   The psychic is not above but behind -its seat is behind the heart, its power is not knowledge but an essential or spiritual feeling -it has the clearest sense of the Truth and a sort of inherent perception of it which is of the nature of soul-perception and soul-feeling.It is our inmost being and supports all the others, mental, vital, physical, but it is also much veiled by them and has to act upon them as an influence rather than by its sovereign right of direct action; its direct action becomes normal and pre- ponderant only at a high stage of development or by yoga. It is not the psychic being which, you feel, gives you the intuitions of things to be or warns you against the results of certain actions; that is some part of the inner being, sometimes the inner mental, sometimes the inner vital, sometimes, it may be, the inner or subtle physical Purusha. The inner being -inner mind, inner vital, inner or subtle physical -knows much that is unknown to the outer mind, the outer vital, the outer physical, for it is in a more direct contact with the secret forces of Nature. The psychic is the inmost being of all; a perception of truth which is inherent in the deepest substance of the consciousness, a sense of the good, true, beautiful, the Divine, is its privilege.
  The central being- the Jivatman which is not born nor evolves but presides over the individual birth and evolution -puts forward a representative of himself on each plane of the consciousness. On the mental plane it is the true mental being, manomaya pursha, on the vital plane the true vital being, pranamaya pursha, on the physical plane the true physical being, annamaya pursha. Each being, therefore is, so long as the Ignorance lasts, centred round his mental, vital or physical Purusha, according to the plane on which he predominantly lives, and that is to him his central being. But the true representative all the time is concealed behind the mind, vital and physical- it is the psychic, our inmost being.
  When the inmost knowledge begins to come, we become aware of the psychic being within us and it comes forward and leads the sadhana. We become aware also of the Jivatman, the undivided Self or Spirit above the manifestation of which the psychic is the representative here.

SRI AUROBINDO

 

One may have knowledge from the psychic -though it is of another kind and is not formulated as in the mind. It is a sort of inner certitude which makes you do the right thing at the right moment and in the right way, without necessarily passing through the reason or mental formation.
   For instance, one may act with a perfect knowledge of what should be done, and without intervention - the least intervention - of the reasoning mind. The mind is silent: it simply looks on and listens in order to register things, it does not act.

THE MOTHER