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There is a double soul or psychic term in us,
as every other
cosmic principle in us is also double. For we have two minds, one
the surface mind of our expressed evolutionary ego, the superficial
mentality created by us in our emergence out of Matter, another
a subliminal mind which is not hampered by our actual mental life
and its strict limitations, something large, powerful and luminous,
the true mental being behind that superficial form of mental personality
which we mistake for ourselves. So also we have two lives, one outer,
involved in the physical body, bound by its past evolution in Matter,
which lives and was born and will die, the other a subliminal force
of life which is not cabined between the narrow boundaries of our
physical birth and death, but is our true vital being behind the
form of living which we ignorantly take for our real existence.
Even in the matter of our being there is this duality; for behind
our body we have a subtler material existence which provides the
substance not only of our physical but of our vital and mental sheaths
and is there- fore our real substance supporting this physical form
which we erroneously imagine to be the whole body of our spirit.
So too we have a double psychic entity in us, the surface desire-soul
which works in our vital cravings, our emotions, aesthetic faculty
and mental seeking for power , knowledge and happiness, and a subliminal
psychic entity, a pure power of light, love, joy and refined essence
of being which is our true soul behind the outer form of psychic
existence we so often dignify by the name. It is when some reflection
of this larger and purer psychic entity comes to the surface that
we say of a man, he has a soul, and when it is absent in his outward
psychic life that we say of him, he has no soul.
The external forms of our being are those of our small
egoistic existence; the subliminal are the formations of our larger
true individuality. Therefore are these that concealed part of our
being in which our individuality is close to our universality, touches
it, is in constant relation and commerce with it. The subliminal
mind in us is open to the universal knowledge of the cosmic Mind,
the subliminal life in us to the universal force of the cosmic Life,
the subliminal physicality in us to the universal force-formation
of cosmic Matter; the thick walls which divide from these things
our surface mind, life, body and which Nature has to pierce with
so much trouble, so imperfectly and by so many skilful-clumsy physical
devices, are there, in the subliminal, only a rarefied medium at
once of separation and communication. So too is the subliminal soul
in us open to the universal delight which the cosmic soul takes
in its own existence and in the existence of the myriad souls that
represent it and in the operations of mind, life and matter by which
Nature lends herself to their play and development; but from this
cosmic delight the surface soul is shut off by egoistic walls of
great thickness which have indeed gates of penetration, but in their
entry through them the touches of the divine cosmic Delight become
dwarfed, distorted or have to come in masked as their own opposites.
SRI AUROBINDO
If knowledge is the widest power of the consciousness and its function
is to free and illumine, yet love is the deepest and most intense
and its privilege is to be the key to the most profound and secret
recesses of the Divine Mystery. Man, because he is a mental being,
is prone to give the highest importance to the thinking mind and
its reason and will and to its way of approach and effectuation
of Truth and, even, he is inclined to hold that there is no other.
The heart with its emotions and incalculable move- ments is to the
eye of his intellect an obscure, uncertain and often a perilous
and misleading power which needs to be kept in control by the reason
and the mental will and intelligence. And yet there is in the heart
or behind it a profounder mystic light which, if not what we call
intuition -for that, though not of the mind, yet descends through
the mind -has yet a direct touch upon Truth and is nearer to the
Divine than the human intellect in its pride of knowledge. According
to the ancient teaching the seat of the immanent Divine, the hidden
Purusha, is in the mystic heart, -the secret heart-cave hrdaye
guhuyam, as the Upanishads put it, -and, according to the experience
of many Yogins, it is from its depths that there comes the voice
or the breath of the inner oracle.
This ambiguity, these opposing appearances of
depth and blindness are created by the double character of the human
emotive being. For there is in front in men a heart of vital emotion
similar to the animal's, if more variously developed; its emotions
are governed by egoistic passipn, blind instinctive affections and
all the play of the life- impulses with their imperfections, perversions,
often sordid degradations, -heart besieged and given over to the
lusts, desires, wraths, intense or fierce demands or little greeds
and mean pettinesses of an obscure and fallenlife- force and debased
by its slavery to any and every impulse. This mixture of the emotive
heart and the sensational hungering vital creates in man a false
soul of desire; it is this that is the crude and dangerous element
which the reason rightly distrusts and feels a need to control,
even though the actual control or rather coercion it succeeds in
establishing over our raw and insistent vital nature remains always
very uncertain and deceptive. But the true soul of man is not there;
it is in the true invisible heart hidden in some luminous cave of
the nature: there under some infiltration of the divine Light is
our soul, a silent inmost being of which few are even aware; for
if all have a soul, few are conscious of their true soul or feel
its direct impulse. There dwells the little spark of the Divine
which supports this obscure mass of our nature and around it grows
the psychic being, the formed soul or the real Man within us. It
is as this psychic being in him grows and the movements of the heart
reflect its divinations and impulsions that man becomes more and
more aware of his soul, ceases to be a superior animal, and, awakening
to glimpses of the godhead within him, admits more and more its
intimations of a deeper life and consciousness and an impulse towards
things divine. It is one of the decisive moments of the integral
Yoga when this psychic being liberated, brought out from the veil
to the front, can pour the full flood of its divinations, seeings
and impulsions on the mind, life and body of man and begin to prepare
the upbuilding of divinity in the earthly nature.
SRI AUROBINDO
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