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It is the very nature of the soul or the psychic
being to turn towards the Divine Truth as the sunflower to the sun;
it accepts and clings to all that is divine or progressing towards
divinity and draws back from all that is a perversion or a denial
of it, from all that is false and undivine. Yet the soul is at first
but a spark and then a little flame of godhead burning in the midst
of a great darkness; for the most part it is veiled in its inner
sanctum and to reveal itself it has to call on the mind, the life-force
and the physical consciousness and persuade them, as best they can,
to express it; ordinarily, it succeeds at most in suffuring their
outwardness with its inner light and modifying with its purifying
fineness their dark obscurities or their coarser mixture. Even when
there is a formed psychic being, able to express itself with some
directness in life, it is still in all but a few a smaller portion
of the being ~ "no bigger in the mass of the body than the
thumb of a man" was the image used by the ancient seers -and
it is not always able to prevail against the obscurity and ignorant
smallness of the physical consciousness, the mistaken surenesses
of the mind or the arrogance and vehemence of the vital nature.
This soul is obliged to accept the human mental, emotive, sensational
life as it is, its relations, its activities, its cherished forms
and figures; it has to labour to disengage and increase the divine
element in all this relative truth mixed with continual falsifying
error, this love turned to the uses of the animal body or the satisfaction
of the vital ego, this life of an average manhood shot with rare
and pale glimpses of Godhead and the darker luridities of the demon
and the brute. Unerring in the essence of its will, it is obliged
often under the pressure of its instruments to submit to mistakes
of action, wrong placement of feeling, wrong choice of person, errors
in the exact form of its will, in the circumstances of its expression
of the infallible inner ideal. Yet is there a divination within
it which makes it a surer guide than the reason or than even the
highest desire, and through apparent errors and stumblings its voice
can still lead better than the precise intellect and the considering
mental judgment. This voice of the soul is not what we call conscience
-for that is only a mental and often conventional erring substitute;
it is a deeper and more seldom heard call; yet to follow it when
heard is wisest: even, it is better to wander at the call of one's
soul than to go apparently straight with the reason and the outward
moral mentor. But it is only when the life turns towards the Divine
that the soul can truly come forward and impose its power on the
outer members; for, itself a spark of the Divine, to grow in flame
towards the Divine is its true life and its very reason of existence
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SRI AUROBINDO
At a certain stage in the Yoga when the mind is
sufficiently quieted and no longer supports itself at every step
on the sufficiency of its mental certitudes, when the vital has
been steadied and subdued and is no longer constantly insistent
on its own rash will, demand and desire, when the physical has been
sufficiently altered not to bury altogether the inner flame under
the mass of its outwardness, obscurity or inertia, an inmost being
hidden within and felt only in its rare influences is able to come
forward and illumine the rest and take up the lead of the Sadhana.
Its character is a one-pointed orientation towards the Divine or
the Highest, one-pointed and yet plastic in action and movement;
it does not create a rigidity of direction like the one-pointed
intellect or a bigotry of the regnant idea or impulse like the one-pointed
vital force; it is at every moment and with a supple sureness that
it points the way to the Truth, automatically distinguishes the
right step from the false, extricates the divine or Godward movement
from the clinging mixture of the undivine. Its action is like a
searchlight showing up all that has to be changed in the nature;
it has in it a flame of will insistent on perfection, on an alchemic
transmutation of all the inner and outer existence. It sees the
divine essence everywhere but rejects the mere mask and the disguising
figure. It insists on Truth, on will and strength and mastery, on
Joy and Love and Beauty, but on a Truth of abiding Knowledge that
surpasses the mere practical mo- mentary truth of the Ignorance,
on an inward joy and not on mere vital pleasure, -for it prefers
rather a purifying suffering and sorrow to degrading satisfactions,
-on love winged upward and not tied to the stake of egoistic craving
or with its feet sunk in the mire, on beauty restored 10 its priesthood
of interpretation of the Eternal, on strength and will and mastery
as instruments not of the ego but of the Spirit. Its will is for
the divinisation of life, the expression through it of a higher
Truth, its dedication to the Divine and the Eternal.
SRI AUROBINDO
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