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At the beginning the soul in Nature, the psychic
entity, whose unfolding is the first step towards a spiritual change,
is an entirely veiled part of us, although it is that by which we
exist and persist as individual beings in Nature. The other parts
of our natural composition are not only mutable but perishable;
but the psychic entity in us persists and is fundamentally the same
always: it contains all essential possibilities of our manifestation
but is not constituted by them; it is not limited by what it manifests,
not contained by the incomplete forms of the manifestation, not
tarnished by the imperfections and impurities, the defects and depravations
of the surface being. It is an over-pure flame of the divinity in
things and nothing that comes to it, nothing that enters into our
experience can pollute its purity or extinguish the flame. This
spiritual stuff is immaculate and luminous and, because it is perfectly
luminous, it is immediately, intimately, directly aware of truth
of being and truth of nature; it is deeply conscious of truth and
good and beauty because truth and good and beauty are akin to its
own native character, forms of something that is inherent in its
own substance. It is aware also of all that contradicts these things,
of all that deviates from its own native character , of falsehood
and evil and the ugly and the unseemly; but it does not become these
things nor is it touched or changed by these opposites of itself
which so powerfully affect its outer instrumentation of mind, life
and body. For the soul, the permanent being in us, puts forth and
uses mind, life and body as its instruments, undergoes the envelopment
of their conditions, but it is other and greater than its members.
If the psychic entity had been from the beginning unveiled
and known to its ministers, not a secluded King in a screened chamber,
the human evolution would have been a rapid soul-outflowering, not
the difficult, chequered and disfigured development it now is; but
the veil is thick and we know not the secret Light within us, the
light in the hidden crypt of the heart's innermost sanctuary. Intimations
rise to our surface from the psyche, but our mind does not detect
their source; it takes them for its own activities because, before
even they come to the surface, they are clothed in mental substance:
thus ignorant of their authority, it follows or does not follow
them according to its bent or turn at the moment. If the mind obeys
the urge of the vital ego, then there is little chance of the psyche
at all controlling the nature or manifesting in us something of
its secret spiritual stuff and native movement; or, if the mind
is over-confident to act in its own smaller light, attached to its
own judgment, will and action of knowledge, then also the soul will
remain veiled and quiescent and wait for the mind's farther evolution.
For the psychic part within is there to support the natural evolution,
and the first natural evolution must be the development of body,
life and mind, successively, and these must act each in its own
kind or together in their ill- assorted partnership in order to
grow and have experience and evolve. The soul gathers the essence
of all our mental, vital and bodily experience and assimilates it
for the farther evolution of our existence in Nature; but this action
is occult and not obtruded on the surface. In the early material
and vital stages of the evolution of being there is indeed no consciousness
of soul; there are psychic activities, but the instrumentation,
the form of these acti- vities are vital and physical, -or mental
when the mind is active. For even the mind, so long as it is primitive
or is developed but still too external, does not recognise their
deeper character. It is easy to regard ourselves as physical beings
or beings of life or mental beings using life and body and to ignore
the existence of the soul altogether: for the only definite idea
that we have of the soul is of something that survives the death
of our bodies; but what this is we do not know because even if we
are conscious sometimes of its presence, we are not normally conscious
of its distinct reality nor do we feel clearly its direct action
in our nature.
As the evolution proceeds, Nature begins slowly and
tentatively to manifest our occult parts; she leads us to look more
and more within ourselves or sets out to initiate more clearly recognisable
intimations and formations of them on the surface. The soul in us,
the psychic principle, has already begun to take secret form; it
puts forward and develops a soul-personality, a distinct psychic
being to represent it. This psychic being remains still behind the
veil in our subliminal part, like the true mental, the true vital
or the true or subtle physical being within us: but, like them,
it acts on the surface life by the influences and intimations it
throws up upon that surface; these form part of the surface aggregate
which is the conglomerate effect of the inner influences and upsurgings,
the visible formation and superstructure which we ordinarily experience
and think of as ourselves. On this ignorant surface we become dimly
aware of something that can be called a soul as distinct from mind,
life or body; we feel it not only as our mental idea or vague instinct
of ourselves, but as a sensible influence in our life and character
and action. A certain sensitive feeling for all that is true and
good and beau1irul, fine and pure and noble, a response to it, a
demand for it, a pressure on mind and life to accept and formulate
it in our thought, feelings, conduct, character is the most usually
recognised, the most general and characteristic, though not the
sole sign of this influence of the psyche. Of the man who has not
this element in him or does not respond at all to this urge, we
say that he has no soul. For it is this influence that we can most
easily recognise as a finer or even a diviner part in us and the
most powerful for the slow turning towards some aim at perfection
in our nature.
But this psychic influence or action does not
come up to the surface quite pure or does not remain distinct in
its purity; if it did, we would be able to distinguish clearly the
soul element in us and follow consciously and fully its dictates.
An occult mental and vital and subtle-physical action intervenes,
mixes with it, tries to use it and turn it to its own profit, dwarfs
its divinity, distorts or diminishes its self-expression, even causes
it to deviate and stumble or stains it with the impurity, smallness
and error of mind and life and body. After it reaches the surface,
thus alloyed and diminished, it is taken hold of by the surface
nature in an obscure reception and ignorant formation, and there
is or can be by this cause a still further deviation and mixture.
A twist is given, a wrong direction is imparted, a wrong application,
a wrong formation, an erroneous result of what is in itself pure
stuff and action of our spiritual being; a formation of consciousnss
is accordingly made which is a mixture of the psychic influence
and its intimations jumbled with mental ideas and opinions, vital
desires and urges, habitual physical tendencies. There coalesce
too with the obscured soul-influence the ignorant though well-intentioned
efforts of these external' "Parts towards a higher direction;
a mental ideation of a very mixed character, often obscure even
in its idealism, some- times even disastrously mistaken, a fervour
and passion of the emotional being throwing up its spray and foam
of feelings, sentiments, sentimentalisms, a dynamic enthusiasm of
the life-parts, eager responses of the physical, the thrills and
excitements of nerve and body, -all these influences coalesce in
a composite formation which is frequently taken as the soul and
its mixed and confused action for the soul-stir, for a psychic development
and action or a realised inner influence. The psychic entity is
itself free from stain or mixture, but what comes up from it is
not protected by that immunity; therefore this confusion becomes
possible.
Moreover, the psychic being, the soul-personality in
us, does not emerge full-grown and luminous; it evolves, passes
through a slow development and formation; its figure of being may
be at first indistinct and may afterwards remain for a long time
weak and undeveloped, not impure but imperfect: for it rests its
formation, its dynamic self-building on the power of soul that has
been actually and more or less successfully, against the resistance
of the Ignorance and Inconscience, put forth in the evolution upon
the surface. Its appearance is the sign of a soul-emergence in Nature,
and if that emergence is as yet small and defective, the psychic
personality also will be stunted or feeble. It is too, by the obscurity
of our con- sciousness, separated from its inner reality, in imperfect
communication with its own source in the depths of the being; for
the road is as yet ill-built, easily obstructed, the wires often
cut or crowded with communications of another kind and proceeding
from another origin: its power to impress what it receives upon
the outer instruments is also imperfect; in its penury it has for
most things to rely on these instruments and it forms its push to
expression and action on their data and not solely on the unerring
perceptions of the psychic entity. In these conditions it cannot
prevent the true psychic light from being diminished or distorted
in the mind into a mere idea or opinion, the psychic feeling in
the heart into a fallible emotion or mere sentiment, the psychic
will to action in the life-parts into a blind vital enthusiasm or
a fervid excitement: it even accepts these mistranslations for want
of something better and tries to fulfil itself through them. For
it is part of the work of the soul to influence mind and heart and
vital being and turn their ideas, feelings, enthusiasms, dynamisms
in the direction of what is divine and luminous; but this has to
be done at first imperfectly, slowly and with a mixture. As the
psychic personality grows stronger, it begins to increase its communion
with the psychic entity behind it and improve its communications
with the surface: it can transmit its intimations to the mind and
heart and life with a greater purity and force; for it is more able
to exercise a strong control and react against false mixtures; now
more and more it makes itself distinctly felt as a power in the
nature. But even so this evolution would be slow and long if left
solely to the difficult automatic action of the evolutionary Energy;
it is only when man awakes to the knowledge of the soul and feels
a need to bring it to the front and make it the master of his life
and action that a quicker conscious method of evolution intervenes
and a psychic transformation becomes possible.
Sri Aurobindo
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