Selections from the Sri Aurobindo Birth Centenary Library
from Volume 18 and 19, The Life Divine
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I abide in the spiritual being and from there destroy the darkness born of
ignorance with the shining lamp of knowledge.
Gita X.11.
These rays are directed downwards, their foundation is above: may they be
set deep within us…. O Varuna, here awake, make wide thy reign; may we
abide in the law of thy workings and be blameless before the Mother
Infinite.
Rig Veda I.24.7,11,15.
The Swan that settles in the purity… born of the Truth, — itself the
Truth, the Vast.
Katha Upanishad II.2. 2.
IF IT is the sole intention of Nature in the evolution of the spiritual man
to awaken him to the supreme Reality and release him from herself, or from
the Ignorance in which she as the Power of the Eternal has masked herself, by
a departure into a higher status of being elsewhere, if this step in the
evolution is a close and an exit, then in the essence her work has been
already accomplished and there is nothing more to be done. The ways have been
built, the capacity to follow them has been developed, the goal or last
height of the creation is manifest; all that is left is for each soul to
reach individually the right stage and turn of its development, enter into
the spiritual ways and pass by its own chosen path out of this inferior
existence. But we have supposed that there is a farther intention, — not
only a revela-tion of the Spirit, but a radical and integral transformation
of Nature. There is a will in her to effectuate a true manifestation of the
embodied life of the Spirit, to complete what she has begun by a passage from
the Ignorance to the Knowledge, to throw off her mask and to reveal herself
as the luminous Consciousness-Force carrying in her the eternal Existence and
its universal Delight of being. It then becomes obvious that there is
something not yet accomplished, there becomes clear to view the much that
has still to be done, bhuri aspasta kartvam; there is a height still to be
reached, a wideness still to be covered by the eye of vision, the wing of
the will, the self-affirmation of the Spirit in the material universe. What
the evolutionary Power has done is to make a few individuals aware of their
souls, conscious of their selves, aware of the eternal being that they are,
to put them into communion with the Divinity or the Reality which is
concealed by her appearances: a certain change of nature prepares,
accompanies or follows upon this illumination, but it is not the complete
and radical change which establishes a secure and settled new principle, a
new creation, a permanent new order of being in the field of terrestrial
Nature. The spiritual man has evolved, but not the supramental being who
shall thenceforward be the leader of that Nature.
This is because the principle of spirituality has yet to affirm itself
in its own complete right and sovereignty; it has been up till now a power
for the mental being to escape from itself or to refine and raise itself to
a spiritual poise, it has availed for the release of the Spirit from mind
and for the enlargement of the being in a spiritualised mind and heart, but
not, — or rather not yet sufficiently, — for the self-affirmation of the
Spirit in its own dynamic and sovereign mastery free from the mind’s
limitations and from the mental instrumentation. The development of another
instrumentation has begun, but has yet to become total and effective; it has
besides to cease to be a purely individual self-creation in an original
Ignorance, something supernormal to earth-life that must always be acquired
as an individual achievement by a difficult endeavour. It must become the
normal nature of a new type of being; as Mind is established here on a basis
of Ignorance seeking for Knowledge and growing into Knowledge, so Supermind
must be established here on a basis of Knowledge growing into its own
greater Light. But this cannot be so long as the spiritual-mental being has
not risen fully to Supermind and brought down its powers into terrestrial
existence. For the gulf between Mind and Supermind has to be bridged, the
closed passages opened and roads of ascent and descent created where there
is now a void and a silence. This can be done only by the triple
transformation to which we have already made a passing reference: there must
first be the psychic change, the conversion of our whole present nature into
a soul-instrumentation; on that or along with that there must be the
spiritual change, the descent of a higher Light, Knowledge, Power, Force,
Bliss, Purity into the whole being, even into the lowest recesses of the
life and body, even into the darkness of our subconscience; last, there must
supervene the supramental transmutation, — there must take place as the
crowning movement the ascent into the Supermind and the transforming descent
of the supramental Consciousness into our entire being and nature.
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 ever-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 activities 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 beautiful, 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 consciousness 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, sometimes 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 consciousness, 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.
This slow development can be aided by the mind’s clear perception and
insistence on something within that survives the death of the body and an
effort to know its nature. But at first this knowledge is impeded by the
fact that there are many elements in us, many formations which present
themselves as soul-elements and can be mistaken for the psyche. In the early
Greek and some other traditions about the after-life, the descriptions
given show very clearly that what was then mistaken for the soul was a
subconscious formation, a subphysical impression-mould or shadow-form of the
being or else a wraith or ghost of the personality. This ghost, which is
mistakenly called the spirit, is sometimes a vital formation reproducing the
man’s characteristics, his surface life-mannerisms, sometimes a
subtle-physical prolongation of the surface form of the mind-shell: at best
it is a sheath of the life-personality which still remains in the front for
some time after the departure from the body. Apart from these confusions
born of an after-death contact with discarded phantasms or remnants of the
sheaths of the personality, the difficulty is due to our ignorance of the
subliminal parts of our nature and the form and powers of the conscious
being or Purusha which preside over their action; owing to this inexperience
we can easily mistake something of the inner mind or vital self for the
psychic. For as Being is one yet multiple, so also the same law prevails in
ourselves and our members; the Spirit, the Purusha is one but it adapts
itself to the formations of Nature. Over each grade of our being a power of
the Spirit presides; we have within us and discover when we go deep enough
inwards a mind-self, a life-self, a physical self; there is a being of mind,
a mental Purusha, expressing something of itself on our surface in the
thoughts, perceptions, activities of our mind-nature, a being of life which
expresses something of itself in the impulses, feelings, sensations,
desires, external life-activities of our vital nature, a physical being, a
being of the body which expresses something of itself in the instincts,
habits, formulated activities of our physical nature. These beings or part
selves of the self in us are powers of the Spirit and therefore not limited
by their temporary expression, for what is thus formulated is only a fragment
of its possibilities; but the expression creates a temporary mental, vital
or physical personality which grows and develops even as the psychic being
or soul-personality grows and develops within us. Each has its own distinct
nature, its influence, its action on the whole of us; but on our surface all
these influences and all this action, as they come up, mingle and create an
aggregate surface being which is a composite, an amalgam of them all, an
outer persistent and yet shifting and mobile formation for the purposes of
this life and its limited experience.
But this aggregate is, because of its composition, a heterogeneous
compound, not a single harmonious and homogeneous whole. This is the reason
why there is a constant confusion and even a conflict in our members which
our mental reason and will are moved to control and harmonise and have often
much difficulty in creating out of their confusion or conflict some kind of
order and guidance; even so, ordinarily, we drift too much or are driven by
the stream of our nature and act from whatever in it comes uppermost at the
time and seizes the instruments of thought and action, — even our seemingly
deliberate choice is more of an automatism than we imagine; our
co-ordination of our multifarious elements and of our consequent thoughts,
feelings, impulses, actions by the reason and will is incomplete and a
half-measure. In animal being Nature acts by her own mental and vital
intuitions; she works out an order by the compulsion of habit and instinct
which the animal implicitly obeys, so that the shiftings of its
consciousness do not matter. But man cannot altogether act in the same way
without forfeiting his prerogative of manhood; he cannot leave his being to
be a chaos of instincts and impulses regulated by the automatism of Nature:
mind has become conscious in him and is therefore self-compelled to make
some attempt, however elementary in many, to see and control and in the end
more and more perfectly harmonise the manifold components, the different and
conflicting tendencies that seem to make up his surface being. He does
succeed in setting up a sort of regulated chaos or ordered confusion in him,
or at least succeeds in thinking that he is directing himself by his mind
and will, even though in fact that direction is only partial; for not only a
disparate consortium of habitual motive-forces but also newly emergent vital
and physical tendencies and impulses, not always calculable or controllable,
and many incoherent and inharmonious mental elements use his reason and will,
enter into and determine his self-building, his nature-development, his life
action. Man is in his self a unique Person, but he is also in his
manifestation of self a multiperson; he will never succeed in being master of
himself until the Person imposes itself on his multipersonality and governs
it: but this can only be imperfectly done by the surface mental will and
reason; it can be perfectly done only if he goes within and finds whatever
central being is by its predominant influence at the head of all his
expression and action. In inmost truth it is his soul that is this central
being, but in outer fact it is often one or other of the part beings in him
that rules, and this representative of the soul, this deputy self he can
mistake for the inmost soul-principle.
This rule of different selves in us is at the root of the stages of
the development of human personality which we have already had occasion to
differentiate, and we can reconsider them now from the point of view of the
government of the nature by the inner principle. In some human beings it is
the physical Purusha, the being of body, who dominates the mind, will and
action; there is then created the physical man mainly occupied with his
corporeal life and habitual needs, impulses, life-habits, mind-habits,
body-habits, looking very little or not at all beyond that, subordinating
and restricting all his other tendencies and possibilities to that narrow
formation. But even in the physical man there are other elements and he
cannot live altogether as the human animal concerned with birth and death
and procreation and the satisfaction of common impulses and desires and the
maintenance of the life and the body: this is his normal type of
personality, but it is crossed, however feebly, with influences by which he
can proceed, if they are developed, to a higher human evolution. If the
inner subtle-physical Purusha insists, he can arrive at the idea of a finer,
more beautiful and perfect physical life and hope or attempt to realise it
in his own or in the collective or group existence. In others it is the
vital self, the being of life, who dominates and rules the mind, the will,
the action; then is created the vital man, concerned with self-affirmation,
self-aggrandisement, life-enlargement, satisfaction of ambition and passion
and impulse and desire, the claims of his ego, domination, power,
excitement, battle and struggle, inner and outer adventure: all else is
incidental or subordinated to this movement and building and expression of
the vital ego. But still in the vital man too there are or can be other
elements of a growing mental or spiritual character, even if these happen to
be less developed than his life-personality and life-power. The nature of
the vital man is more active, stronger and more mobile, more turbulent and
chaotic, often to the point of being quite unregulated, than that of the
physical man who holds on to the soil and has a certain material poise and
balance, but it is more kinetic and creative: for the element of the vital
being is not earth but air; it has more movement, less status. A vigorous
vital mind and will can grasp and govern the kinetic vital energies, but it
is more by a forceful compulsion and constraint than by a harmonisation of
the being. If, however, a strong vital personality, mind and will can get the
reasoning intelligence to give it a firm support and be its minister, then
a certain kind of forceful formation can be made, more or less balanced but
always powerful, successful and effective, which can impose itself on the
nature and environment and arrive at a strong self-affirmation in life and
action. This is the second step of harmonised formulation possible in the
ascent of the nature.
At a higher stage of the evolution of personality the being of mind
may rule; there is then created the mental man who lives predominantly in
the mind as the others live in the vital or the physical nature. The mental
man tends to subordinate to his mental self-expression, mental aims, mental
interests or to a mental idea or ideal the rest of his being: because of the
difficulty of this subordination and its potent effect when achieved, it is
at once more difficult for him and easier to arrive at a harmony of his
nature. It is easier because the mental will once in control can convince by
the power of the reasoning intelligence and at the same time dominate,
compress or suppress the life and the body and their demands, arrange and
harmonise them, force them to be its instruments, even reduce them to a
minimum so that they shall not disturb the mental life or pull it down from
its ideative or idealising movement. It is more difficult because life and
body are the first powers and, if they are in the least strong, can impose
themselves with an almost irresistible insistence on the mental ruler. Man
is a mental being and the mind is the leader of his life and body; but this
is a leader who is much led by his followers and has sometimes no other will
than what they impose on him. Mind in spite of its power is often impotent
before the inconscient and subconscient which obscure its clarity and carry
it away on the tide of instinct or impulse; in spite of its clarity it is
fooled by vital and emotional suggestions into giving sanction to ignorance
and error, to wrong thought and to wrong action, or it is obliged to look on
while the nature follows what it knows to be wrong, dangerous or evil. Even
when it is strong and clear and dominant, Mind, though it imposes a certain,
a considerable mentalised harmony, cannot integrate the whole being and
nature. These harmonisations by an inferior control are, besides,
inconclusive, because it is one part of the nature which dominates and
fulfils itself while the others are coerced and denied their fullness. They
can be steps on the way, but not final; therefore in most men there is no
such sole dominance and effected partial harmony, but only a predominance
and for the rest an unstable equilibrium of a personality half formed, half
in formation, sometimes a disequilibrium or unbalance due to the lack of a
central government or the disturbance of a formerly achieved partial poise.
All must be transitional until a first, though not a final, true
harmonisation is achieved by finding our real centre. For the true central
being is the soul, but this being stands back and in most human natures is
only the secret witness or, one might say, a constitutional ruler who allows
his ministers to rule for him, delegates to them his empire, silently
assents to their decisions and only now and then puts in a word which they
can at any moment override and act otherwise. But this is so long as the
soul-personality put forward by the psychic entity is not yet sufficiently
developed; when this is strong enough for the inner entity to impose itself
through it, then the soul can come forward and control the nature. It is by
the coming forward of this true monarch and his taking up of the reins of
government that there can take place a real harmonisation of our being and
our life.
A first condition of the soul’s complete emergence is a direct contact
in the surface being with the spiritual Reality. Because it comes from that,
the psychic element in us turns always towards whatever in phenomenal Nature
seems to belong to a higher Reality and can be accepted as its sign and
character. At first, it seeks this Reality through the good, the true, the
beautiful, through all that is pure and fine and high and noble: but
although this touch through outer signs and characters can modify and
prepare the nature, it cannot entirely or most inwardly and profoundly
change it. For such an inmost change the direct contact with the Reality
itself is indispensable since nothing else can so deeply touch the
foundations of our being and stir it or cast the nature by its stir into a
ferment of transmutation. Mental representations, emotional and dynamic
figures have their use and value; Truth, Good and Beauty are in themselves
primary and potent figures of the Reality, and even in their forms as seen
by the mind, as felt by the heart, as realised in the life can be lines of
an ascent: but it is in a spiritual substance and being of them and of itself
that That which they represent has to come into our experience.
The soul may attempt to achieve this contact mainly through the
thinking mind as intermediary and instrument; it puts a psychic impression
on the intellect and the larger mind of insight and intuitional intelligence
and turns them in that direction. At its highest the thinking mind is drawn
always towards the impersonal; in its search it becomes conscious of a
spiritual essence, an impersonal Reality which expresses itself in all these
outward signs and characters but is more than any formation or manifesting
figure. It feels something of which it becomes intimately and invisibly
aware, — a supreme Truth, a supreme Good, a supreme Beauty, a supreme
Purity, a supreme Bliss; it bears the increasing touch, less and less
impalpable and abstract, more and more spiritually real and concrete, the
touch and pressure of an Eternity and Infinity which is all this that is and
more. There is a pressure from this Impersonality that seeks to mould the
whole mind into a form of itself; at the same time the impersonal secret and
law of things becomes more and more visible. The mind develops into the
mind of the sage, at first the high mental thinker, then the spiritual sage
who has gone beyond the abstractions of thought to the beginnings of a
direct experience. As a result the mind becomes pure, large, tranquil,
impersonal; there is a similar tranquillising influence on the parts of
life: but otherwise the result may remain incomplete; for the mental change
leads more naturally towards an inner status and an outer quietude, but,
poised in this purifying quietism, not drawn like the vital parts towards a
discovery of new life-energies, does not press for a full dynamic effect on
the nature.
A higher endeavour through the mind does not change this balance; for
the tendency of the spiritualised mind is to go on upwards and, since above
itself the mind loses its hold on forms, it is into a vast formless and
featureless impersonality that it enters. It becomes aware of the unchanging
Self, the sheer Spirit, the pure bareness of an essential Existence, the
formless Infinite and the nameless Absolute. This culmination can be
arrived at more directly by tending immediately beyond all forms and
figures, beyond all ideas of good or evil or true or false or beautiful or
unbeautiful to That which exceeds all dualities, to the experience of a
supreme oneness, infinity, eternity or other ineffable sublimation of the
mind’s ultimate and extreme percept of Self or Spirit. A spiritualised
consciousness is achieved and the life falls quiet, the body ceases to need
and to clamour, the soul itself merges into the spiritual silence. But this
transformation through the mind does not give us the integral transformation;
the psychic transmutation is replaced by a spiritual change on the rare and
high summits, but this is not the complete divine dynamisation of Nature.
A second approach made by the soul to the direct contact is through
the heart: this is its own more close and rapid way because its occult seat
is there, just behind in the heart-centre, in close contact with the
emotional being in us; it is consequently through the emotions that it can
act best at the beginning with its native power, with its living force of
concrete experience. It is through a love and adoration of the All-Beautiful
and All-Blissful, the All-Good, the True, the spiritual Reality of love,
that the approach is made; the aesthetic and emotional parts join together
to offer the soul, the life, the whole nature to that which they worship.
This approach through adoration can get its full power and impetus only when
the mind goes beyond impersonality to the awareness of a supreme Personal
Being: then all becomes intense, vivid, concrete; the heart’s emotion,
feeling, spiritualised sense reach their absolute; an entire self-giving
becomes possible, imperative. The nascent spiritual man makes his appearance
in the emotional nature as the devotee, the bhakta; if, in addition, he
becomes directly aware of his soul and its dictates, unites his emotional
with his psychic personality and changes his life and vital parts by
purity, God-ecstasy, the love of God and men and all creatures into a thing
of spiritual beauty, full of divine light and good, he develops into the
saint and reaches the highest inner experience and most considerable change
of nature proper to this way of approach to the Divine Being. But for the
purpose of an integral transformation this too is not enough; there must be
a transmutation of the thinking mind and all the vital and physical parts of
consciousness in their own character.
This larger change can be partly attained by adding to the experiences
of the heart a consecration of the pragmatic will which must succeed in
carrying with it, — for otherwise it cannot be effective, — the adhesion
of the dynamic vital part which supports the mental dynamis and is our first
instrument of outer action. This consecration of the will in works proceeds
by a gradual elimination of the ego-will and its motive-power of desire;
the ego subjects itself to some higher law and finally effaces itself, seems
not to exist or exists only to serve a higher Power or a higher Truth or to
offer its will and acts to the Divine Being as an instrument. The law of
being and action or the light of Truth which then guides the seeker, may be
a clarity or power or principle which he perceives on the highest height of
which his mind is capable; or it may be a truth of the divine Will which he
feels present and working within him or guiding him by a Light or a Voice or
a Force or a divine Person or Presence. In the end by this way one arrives
at a consciousness in which one feels the Force or Presence acting within
and moving or governing all the actions and the personal will is entirely
surrendered or identified with that greater Truth-Will, Truth-Power or
Truth-Presence. A combination of all these three approaches, the approach of
the mind, the approach of the will, the approach of the heart, creates a
spiritual or psychic condition of the surface being and nature in which
there is a larger and more complex openness to the psychic light within us
and to the spiritual Self or the Ishwara, to the Reality now felt above and
enveloping and penetrating us. In the nature there is a more powerful and
many-sided change, a spiritual building and self-creation, the appearance of
a composite perfection of the saint, the selfless worker and the man of
spiritual knowledge.
But, for this change to arrive at its widest totality and profound
completeness, the consciousness has to shift its centre and its static and
dynamic position from the surface to the inner being; it is there that we
must find the foundation for our thought, life and action. For to stand
outside on our surface and to receive from the inner being and follow its
intimations is not a sufficient transformation; one must cease to be the
surface personality and become the inner Person, the Purusha. But this is
difficult, first because the outer nature opposes the movement and clings to
its normal accustomed poise and externalised way of existence and, in
addition, because there is a long way from the surface to the depths in
which the psychic entity is veiled from us, and this intervening space is
filled with a subliminal nature and nature-movements which are not by any
means all of them favourable to the completion of the inward movement. The
outer nature has to undergo a change of poise, a quieting, a purification
and fine mutation of its substance and energy by which the many obstacles in
it rarefy, drop away or otherwise disappear; it then becomes possible to
pass through to the depths of our being and from the depths so reached a new
consciousness can be formed, both behind the exterior self and in it,
joining the depths to the surface. There must grow up within us or there
must manifest a consciousness more and more open to the deeper and the
higher being, more and more laid bare to the cosmic Self and Power and to
what comes down from the Transcendence, turned to a higher Peace, permeable
to a greater light, force and ecstasy, a consciousness that exceeds the
small personality and surpasses the limited light and experience of the
surface mind, the limited force and aspiration of the normal
life-consciousness, the obscure and limited responsiveness of the body.
Even before the tranquillising purification of the outer nature has
been effected or before it is sufficient, one can still break down the wall
screening our inner being from our outer awareness by a strong force of call
and aspiration, a vehement will or violent effort or an effective discipline
or process; but this may be a premature movement and is not without its
serious dangers. In entering within one may find oneself amidst a chaos of
unfamiliar and supernormal experiences to which one has not the key or a
press of subliminal or cosmic forces, subconscient, mental, vital,
subtle-physical, which may unduly sway or chaotically drive the being,
encircle it in a cave of darkness, or keep it wandering in a wilderness of
glamour, allurement, deception, or push it into an obscure battlefield full
of secret and treacherous and misleading or open and violent oppositions;
beings and voices and influences may appear to the inner sense and vision
and hearing claiming to be the Divine Being or His messengers or Powers and
Godheads of the Light or guides of the path to realisation, while in truth
they are of a very different character. If there is too much egoism in the
nature of the seeker or a strong passion or an excessive ambition, vanity or
other dominating weakness, or an obscurity of the mind or a vacillating will
or a weakness of the life-force or an unsteadiness in it or want of
balance, he is likely to be seized on through these deficiencies and to be
frustrated or to deviate, misled from the true way of the inner life and
seeking into false paths, or to be left wandering about in an intermediate
chaos of experiences and fail to find his way out into the true realisation.
These perils were well-known to a past spiritual experience and have been
met by imposing the necessity of initiation, of discipline, of methods of
purification and testing by ordeal, of an entire submission to the
directions of the path-finder or path-leader, one who has realised the Truth
and himself possesses and is able to communicate the light, the experience,
a guide who is strong to take by the hand and carry over difficult passages
as well as to instruct and point out the way. But even so the dangers will
be there and can only be surmounted if there is or there grows up a complete
sincerity, a will for purity, a readiness for obedience to the Truth, for
surrender to the Highest, a readiness to lose or to subject to a divine yoke
the limiting and self-affirming ego. These things are the sign that the
true will for realisation, for conversion of the consciousness, for
transformation is there, the necessary stage of the evolution has been
reached: in that condition the defects of nature which belong to the human
being cannot be a permanent obstacle to the change from the mental to the
spiritual status; the process may never be entirely easy, but the way will
have been made open and practicable.
One effective way often used to facilitate this entry into the inner
self is the separation of the Purusha, the conscious being, from the
Prakriti, the formulated nature. If one stands back from the mind and its
activities so that they fall silent at will or go on as a surface movement
of which one is the detached and disinterested witness, it becomes possible
eventually to realise oneself as the inner Self of mind, the true and pure
mental being, the Purusha; by similarly standing back from the
life-activities, it is possible to realise oneself as the inner Self of
life, the true and pure vital being, the Purusha; there is even a Self of
body of which, by standing back from the body and its demands and
activities and entering into a silence of the physical consciousness
watching the action of its energy, it is possible to become aware, a true
and pure physical being, the Purusha. So too, by standing back from all
these activities of nature successively or together, it becomes possible to
realise one’s inner being as the silent impersonal self, the witness
Purusha. This will lead to a spiritual realisation and liberation, but will
not necessarily bring about a transformation; for the Purusha, satisfied to
be free and himself, may leave the nature, the Prakriti, to exhaust its
accumulated impetus by an unsupported action, a mechanical continuance not
renewed and reinforced or vivified and prolonged by his consent, and use
this rejection as a means of withdrawing from all nature. The Purusha has to
become not only the witness but the knower and source, the master of all the
thought and action, and this can only be partially done so long as one
remains on the mental level or has still to use the ordinary instrumentation
of mind, life and body. A certain mastery can indeed be achieved, but
mastery is not transformation; the change made by it cannot be sufficient to
be integral: for that it is essential to get back, beyond mind-being,
life-being, body-being, still more deeply inward to the psychic entity
inmost and profoundest within us, — or else to open to the superconscient
highest domains. For this penetration into the luminous crypt of the soul
one has to get through all the intervening vital stuff to the psychic centre
within us, however long, tedious or difficult may be the process. The method
of detachment from the insistence of all mental and vital and physical
claims and calls and impulsions, a concentration in the heart, austerity,
self-purification and rejection of the old mind-movements and life-movements,
rejection of the ego of desire, rejection of false needs and false habits,
are all useful aids to this difficult passage: but the strongest, most
central way is to found all such or other methods on a self-offering and
surrender of ourselves and of our parts of nature to the Divine Being, the
Ishwara. A strict obedience to the wise and intuitive leading of a Guide is
also normal and necessary for all but a few specially gifted seekers.
As the crust of the outer nature cracks, as the walls of inner
separation break down, the inner light gets through, the inner fire burns
in the heart, the substance of the nature and the stuff of consciousness
refine to a greater subtlety and purity, and the deeper psychic experiences,
those which are not solely of an inner mental or inner vital character,
become possible in this subtler, purer, finer substance; the soul begins to
unveil itself, the psychic personality reaches its full stature. The soul,
the psychic entity, then manifests itself as the central being which upholds
mind and life and body and supports all the other powers and functions of
the Spirit; it takes up its greater function as the guide and ruler of the
nature. A guidance, a governance begins from within which exposes every
movement to the light of Truth, repels what is false, obscure, opposed to
the divine realisation: every region of the being, every nook and corner of
it, every movement, formation, direction, inclination of thought, will,
emotion, sensation, action, reaction, motive, disposition, propensity,
desire, habit of the conscious or subconscious physical, even the most
concealed, camouflaged, mute, recondite, is lighted up with the unerring
psychic light, their confusions dissipated, their tangles disentangled,
their obscurities, deceptions, self-deceptions precisely indicated and
removed; all is purified, set right, the whole nature harmonised, modulated
in the psychic key, put in spiritual order. This process may be rapid or
tardy according to the amount of obscurity and resistance still left in the
nature, but it goes on unfalteringly so long as it is not complete. As a
final result the whole conscious being is made perfectly apt for spiritual
experience of every kind, turned towards spiritual truth of thought,
feeling, sense, action, tuned to the right responses, delivered from the
darkness and stubbornness of the tamasic inertia, the turbidities and
turbulences and impurities of the rajasic passion and restless unharmonised
kinetism, the enlightened rigidities and sattwic limitations or poised
balancements of constructed equilibrium which are the character of the
Ignorance.
This is the first result, but the second is a free inflow of all kinds
of spiritual experience, experience of the Self, experience of the Ishwara
and the Divine Shakti, experience of cosmic consciousness, a direct touch
with cosmic forces and with the occult movements of universal Nature, a
psychic sympathy and unity and inner communication and interchanges of all
kinds with other beings and with Nature, illuminations of the mind by
knowledge, illuminations of the heart by love and devotion and spiritual
joy and ecstasy, illuminations of the sense and the body by higher
experience, illuminations of dynamic action in the truth and largeness of a
purified mind and heart and soul, the certitudes of the divine light and
guidance, the joy and power of the divine force working in the will and the
conduct. These experiences are the result of an opening outward of the inner
and inmost being and nature; for then there comes into play the soul’s
power of unerring inherent consciousness, its vision, its touch on things
which is superior to any mental cognition; there is there, native to the
psychic consciousness in its pure working, an immediate sense of the world
and its beings, a direct inner contact with them and a direct contact with
the Self and with the Divine, — a direct knowledge, a direct sight of
Truth and of all truths, a direct penetrating spiritual emotion and feeling,
a direct intuition of right will and right action, a power to rule and to
create an order of the being not by the gropings of the superficial self,
but from within, from the inner truth of self and things and the occult
realities of Nature.
Some of these experiences can come by an opening of the inner mental
and vital being, the inner and larger and subtler mind and heart and life
within us, without any full emergence of the soul, the psychic entity, since
there too there is a power of direct contact of consciousness: but the
experience might then be of a mixed character; for there could be an
emergence not only of the subliminal knowledge but of the subliminal
ignorance. An insufficient expansion of the being, a limitation by mental
idea, by narrow and selective emotion or by the form of the temperament so
that there would be only an imperfect self-creation and action and not the
free soul-emergence, could easily occur. In the absence of any or of a
complete psychic emergence, experiences of certain kinds, experiences of
greater knowledge and force, a surpassing of the ordinary limits, might lead
to a magnified ego and even bring about instead of an out-flowering of what
is divine or spiritual an uprush of the titanic or demoniac, or might call
in agencies and powers which, though not of this disastrous type, are of a
powerful but inferior cosmic character. But the rule and guidance of the
soul brings into all experience the tendency of light, of integration, of
harmony and intimate rightness which is native to the psychic essence. A
psychic or, more widely speaking, a psycho-spiritual transformation of this
kind would be already a vast change of our mental human nature.
But all this change and all this experience, though psychic and
spiritual in essence and character, would still be, in its parts of
life-effectuation, on the mental, vital and physical level; its dynamic
spiritual outcome (1) The psychic and the spiritual opening with their
experiences and consequences can lead away from life or to a Nirvana; but
they are here being considered solely as steps in a transformation of the
nature.would be a flowering of the soul in mind and life and body, but in
act and form it would be circumscribed within the limitations, — however
enlarged, uplifted and rarefied, — of an inferior instrumentation. It would
be a reflected and modified manifestation of things whose full reality,
intensity, largeness, oneness and diversity of truth and power and delight
are above us, above mind and therefore above any perfection, within mind’s
own formula, of the foundations or superstructure of our present nature. A
highest spiritual transformation must intervene on the psychic or
psycho-spiritual change; the psychic movement inward to the inner being, the
Self or Divinity within us, must be completed by an opening upward to a
supreme spiritual status or a higher existence. This can be done by our
opening into what is above us, by an ascent of consciousness into the
ranges of overmind and supramental nature in which the sense of Self and
Spirit is ever unveiled and permanent and in which the self-luminous
instrumentation of the Self and Spirit is not restricted or divided as in our
mind-nature, life-nature, body-nature. This also the psychic change makes
possible; for as it opens us to the cosmic consciousness now hidden from us
by many walls of limiting individuality, so also it opens us to what is now
superconscient to our normality because it is hidden from us by the strong,
hard and bright lid of mind, — mind constricting, dividing and separative.
The lid thins, is slit, breaks asunder or opens and disappears under the
pressure of the psycho-spiritual change and the natural urge of the new
spiritualised consciousness towards that of which it is an expression here.
This effectuation of an aperture and its consequences may not at all take
place if there is only a partial psychic emergence satisfied with the
experience of the Divine Reality in the normal degrees of the spiritualised
mind: but if there is any awakening to the existence of these higher
supernormal levels, then an aspiration towards them may break the lid or
operate a rift in it. This may happen long before the psycho-spiritual
change is complete or even before it has well begun or proceeded far,
because the psychic personality has become aware and has an eager
concentration towards the superconscience. An early illumination from above
or a rending of the upper velamen can come as an outcome of aspiration or
some inner readiness, or it may even come uncalled for or not called for by
any conscious part of the mind, — perhaps by a secret subliminal necessity
or by an action or pressure from the higher levels, by something which is
felt as the touch of the Divine Being, the touch of the Spirit, — and its
results can be exceedingly powerful. But if it is brought about by a
premature pressure from below, it can be attended with difficulties and
dangers which are absent when the full psychic emergence precedes this first
admission to the superior ranges of our spiritual evolution. The choice,
however, does not always rest with our will, for the operations of the
spiritual evolution in us are very various, and according to the line it
has followed will be the turn taken at any critical phase by the action of
the Consciousness-Force in its urge towards a higher self-manifestation and
formation of our existence.
1. The psychic and the spiritual opening with their experiences and consequences can lead
away from life or to a Nirvana; but they are here being considered solely as steps in a
transformation of the nature.
If the rift in the lid of mind is made, what happens is an opening of
vision to something above us or a rising up towards it or a descent of its
powers into our being. What we see by the opening of vision is an Infinity
above us, an eternal Presence or an infinite Existence, an infinity of
consciousness, an infinity of bliss, — a boundless Self, a boundless Light,
a boundless Power, a boundless Ecstasy. It may be that for a long time all
that is obtained is the occasional or frequent or constant vision of it and
a longing and aspiration, but without anything further, because, although
something in the mind, heart or other part of the being has opened to this
experience, the lower nature as a whole is too heavy and obscure as yet for
more. But there may be, instead of this first wide awareness from below or
subsequently to it, an ascension of the mind to heights above: the nature
of these heights we may not know or clearly discern, but some consequence of
the ascent is felt; there is often too an awareness of infinite ascension
and return but no record or translation of that higher state. This is
because it has been superconscient to mind and therefore mind, when it rises
into it, is unable at first to retain there its power of conscious
discernment and defining experience. But when this power begins to awake and
act, when mind becomes by degrees conscious in what was to it
superconscient, then there begins a knowledge and experience of superior
planes of existence. The experience is in accord with that which is brought
to us by the first opening of vision: the mind rises into a higher plane of
pure Self, silent, tranquil, illimitable; or it rises into regions of Light
or of Felicity, or into planes where it feels an infinite Power or a divine
Presence or experiences the contact of a divine Love or Beauty or the
atmosphere of a wider and greater and luminous Knowledge. In the return the
spiritual impression abides; but the mental record is often blurred and
remains as a vague or a fragmentary memory; the lower consciousness from
which the ascent took place falls back to what it was, with only the
addition of an unkept or a remembered but no longer dynamic experience. In
time the ascent comes to be made at will and the consciousness brings back
and retains some effect or some gain of its temporary sojourn in these
higher countries of the Spirit. These ascents take place for many in trance,
but are perfectly possible in a concentration of the waking consciousness
or, where that consciousness has become sufficiently psychic, at any
unconcentrated moment by an upward attraction or affinity. But these two
types of contact with the superconscient, though they can be powerfully
illuminating, ecstatic or liberating, are by themselves insufficiently
effective: for the full spiritual transformation more is needed, a permanent
ascension from the lower into the higher consciousness and an effectual
permanent descent of the higher into the lower nature.
This is the third motion, the descent which is essential for bringing
the permanent ascension, an increasing inflow from above, an experience of
reception and retention of the descending Spirit or its powers and elements
of consciousness. This experience of descent can take place as a result of
the other two movements or automatically before either has happened,
through a sudden rift in the lid or a percolation, a downpour or an influx.
A light descends and touches or envelops or penetrates the lower being, the
mind, the life or the body; or a presence or a power or a stream of
knowledge pours in waves or currents, or there is a flood of bliss or a
sudden ecstasy; the contact with the superconscient has been established.
For such experiences repeat themselves till they become normal, familiar and
well-understood, revelatory of their contents and their significance which
may have at first been involved and wrapped into secrecy by the figure of
the covering experience. For a knowledge from above begins to descend,
frequently, constantly, then uninterruptedly, and to manifest in the mind’s
quietude or silence; intuitions and inspirations, revelations born of a
greater sight, a higher truth and wisdom, enter into the being, a luminous
intuitive discrimination works which dispels all darkness of understanding
or dazzling confusions, puts all in order; a new consciousness begins to
form, the mind of a high wide self-existent thinking knowledge or an
illumined or an intuitive or an overmental consciousness with new forces of
thought or sight and a greater power of direct spiritual realisation which
is more than thought or sight, a greater becoming in the spiritual
substance of our present being; the heart and the sense become subtle,
intense, large to embrace all existence, to see God, to feel and hear and
touch the Eternal, to make a deeper and closer unity of self and the world
in a transcendent realisation. Other decisive experiences, other changes of
consciousness determine themselves which are corollaries and consequences
of this fundamental change. No limit can be fixed to this revolution; for
it is in its nature an invasion by the Infinite.
This, effected little by little or in a succession of great and swift definitive experiences, is the
process of the spiritual transformation. It achieves itself and culminates in an upward ascent
often repeated by which in the end the consciousness fixes itself on a higher plane and from
there sees and governs the mind, life and body; it achieves itself also in an increasing descent of
the powers of the higher consciousness and knowledge which becomes more and more the
whole normal consciousness and knowledge. A light and power, a knowledge and force are felt
which first take possession of the mind and remould it, afterwards of the life=part and remould
that, finally of the little physical consciousness and leave it no longer little but wide and plastic
and even infinite. For this new consciousness has itself the nature of infinity: it brings to us the
abiding spiritual sense and awareness of the Infinite and Eternal with a great largeness of the
nature and a breaking down of its limitations; immortality becomes no longer a belief or an
experience but a normal self-awareness; the close presence of the Divine Being, his rule of the
world and of our self and natural members, his force working in us and everywhere, the peace
of the infinite, the joy of the Infinite are now concrete and constant in the being; in all sights and
forms one sees the Eternal, the Reality, in all sounds one hears it, in all touches feels it; there is
nothing else but its forms and personalities and manifestations; the joy or adoration of the heart,
the embrace of all existence, the unity of the spirit are abiding realities. The consciousness of
the mental creature is turning or has been already turned wholly into the consciousness of the
spiritual being. This is the second of the three transformations; uniting the manifested existence
with what is above it, it is the middle step of the three, the decisive transition of the spiritually
evolving nature.
If the spirit could from the first dwell securely on the superior heights and deal with a blank and
virgin stuff of mind and matter, a complete spiritual transformation might be rapid, even facile:
but the actual process of Nature is more difficult, the logic of her movement more manifold,
contorted, winding, comprehensive; she recognises all the data of the task she has set to herself
and is not satisfied with a summary triumph over her own complexities. Every part of our being
has to be taken in its own nature and character, with all the moulds and writings of the past still
there in it: each minutest portion and movement must either be destroyed and replaced if it is
unfit, or, if it is capable, transmuted into the truth of the higher being. If the psychic change is
complete, this can be done by a painless process, though still the programme must be long and
scrupulous and the progress deliberate; but otherwise one has to be satisfied with a partial result
or, if one’s own scrupulousness of perfection or hunger of the spirit is insatiable, consent to a
difficult, often painful and seemingly interminable action. For ordinarily the consciousness does
not rise to the summits except in the highest moments; it remains on the mental level and
receives descents from above, sometimes a single descent of some spiritual power that stays
and moulds the being into something predominatingly spiritual, or a succession of descents
bringing into it more and more of the spiritual status and dynamis: but unless one can live on the
highest height reached, there cannot be the complete or more integral change. If the psychic
mutation has not taken place, if there has been a premature pulling down of the higher Forces,
their contact may be too strong for the flawed and impure material of Nature and its immediate
fate may be that of the unbaked jar of the Veda which could not hold the divine Soma Wine; or
the descending influence may withdraw or be spilt because the nature cannot contain or keep it.
Again, if it is Power that descends, the egoistic mind or vital may try to seize on it for its own use
and a magnified ego or a hunting after powers and self-aggrandising masteries may be the
untoward result. The Ananda descending cannot be held if there is too much sexual impurity
creating an intoxicant or degrading mixture; the Power recedes, if there is ambition, vanity or
other aggressive form of lower self, the Light if there is an attachment to obscurity or to any form
of the Ignorance, the Presence if the chamber of the heart has not been made pure. Or some
undivine Force may try to seize hold, not of the Power itself, for that withdraws, but of the result
of force it leaves behind in the instrument and use it for the purposes of the Adversary. Even if
none of these more disastrous faults or errors should take place, still the numerous mistakes of
reception or the imperfections of the vessel may impede the transformation. The Power has to
come at intervals and work meanwhile behind the veil or hold itself back through long periods of
obscure assimilation or preparation of the recalcitrant parts of Nature; the Light has to work in
darkness or semi-darkness on the regions in us that are still in the Night. At any moment the
work may be stayed, personally for this life, because the nature is able to receive or assimilate
no more, — for it has reached the present limits of its capacity, — or because the mind may be
ready but the vital, when faced with a choice between the old life and the new, refuses, or if the
vital accepts, the body may prove too weak, unfit or flawed for the necessary change of its
consciousness and its dynamic transformation.
Moreover, the necessity of working out the change separately in each
part of the being in its own nature and character compels the consciousness
to descend into each in turn and act there according to its state and its
possibility. If the work were done from above, from some spiritual height,
there might be a sublimation or uplifting or the creation of a new structure
compelled by the sheer force of the influence from above: but this change
might not be accepted as native to itself by the lower being; it would not
be a total growth, an integral evolution, but a partial and imposed
formation, affecting or liberating some parts of the being, suppressing
others or leaving them as they were; a creation from outside the normal
nature, by imposition upon it, it could be durable in its entirety only as
long as there was a maintenance of the creating influence. A descent of
consciousness into the lower levels is therefore necessary, but in this way
also it is difficult to work out the full power of the higher principle;
there is a modification, dilution, diminution which keeps up an imperfection
and limitation in the results: the light of a greater knowledge comes down
but gets blurred and modified, its significance misinterpreted or its truth
mixed with mental and vital error, or the force, the power to fulfil itself
is not commensurate with its light. A light and power of the Overmind
working in its own full right and in its own sphere is one thing, the same
light working in the obscurity of the physical consciousness and under its
conditions is something quite different and, owing to dilution and mixture,
far inferior in its knowledge and force and results. A mutilated power, a
partial effect or hampered movement is the consequence.
This is indeed the reason of the slow and difficult emergence of the
Consciousness-Force in Nature: for Mind and Life have to descend into Matter
and suit themselves to its conditions; changed and diminished by the
obscurity and reluctant inertia of the substance and force in which they
work, they are not able to make a complete transformation of their material
into a fit instrument and a changed substance revelatory of their real and
native power. The Life-consciousness is unable to effectuate the greatness
and felicity of its mighty or beautiful impulses in the material existence;
its impetus fails it, its force of effectuation is inferior to the truth of
its conceptions, the form betrays the Life-intuition within it which it
tries to render into terms of Life-being. The Mind is unable to achieve its
high ideas in the medium of Life or Matter without deductions and
compromises which deprive them of their divinity; its clarities of knowledge
and will are not matched by its force to mould this inferior substance to
obey and express it: on the contrary, its own powers get affected, its will
is divided, its knowledge confused and clouded by the turbidities of life and
the incomprehensiveness of Matter. Neither Life nor Mind succeeds in
converting or perfecting the material existence, because they cannot attain
to their own full force in these conditions; they need to call in a higher
power to liberate and fulfil them. But the higher spiritual-mental powers
also undergo the same disability when they descend into Life and Matter; they
can do much more, achieve much luminous change, but the modification, the
limitation, the disparity between the consciousness that comes in and the
force of effectuation that it can mentalise and materialise, are constantly
there and the result is a diminished creation. The change made is often
extraordinary, there is even something which looks like a total conversion
and reversal of the state of consciousness and an uplifting of its movements,
but it is not dynamically absolute.
Only the Supermind can thus descend without losing its full power of
action; for its action is always intrinsic and automatic, its will and
knowledge identical and the result commensurate: its nature is a
self-achieving Truth-Consciousness and, if it limits itself or its working,
it is by choice and intention, not by compulsion; in the limits it chooses
its action and the results of its action are harmonious and inevitable.
Again, Overmind is, like Mind, a dividing principle, and its characteristic
operation is to work out in an independent formation a selected harmony; its
global action enables it indeed to create a harmony whole and perfect in
itself or to unite or fuse its harmonies together, to synthetise; but,
labouring under the restrictions of Mind, Life and Matter, it is obliged to
do it by sections and their joinings.
Its tendency of totality is hampered by its selective tendency which is
accentuated by the nature of the mental and life material in which it is
working here; what it can achieve is separate limited spiritual creations
each perfect in itself, but not the integral knowledge and its manifestation.
For this reason and because of the diminishing of its native light and power
it is unable to do fully what is needed and has to call in a greater power,
the supramental force, to liberate and fulfil it. As the psychic change has
to call in the spiritual to complete it, so the first spiritual change has
to call in the supramental transformation to complete it. For all these
steps forward are, like those before them, transitional; the whole radical
change in the evolution from a basis of Ignorance to a basis of Knowledge
can only come by the intervention of the supramental Power and its direct
action in earth-existence.
This then must be the nature of the third and final transformation
which finishes the passage of the soul through the Ignorance and bases its
consciousness, its life, its power and form of manifestation on a complete
and completely effective self-knowledge. The Truth-Consciousness, finding
evolutionary Nature ready, has to descend into her and enable her to liberate
the supramental principle within her; so must be created the supramental
and spiritual being as the first unveiled manifestation of the truth of the
Self and Spirit in the material universe.
Book Two, Chapter Twenty-Five, "The Triple Transformation"
Integral Yoga Literature – By Sri Aurobindo
Selections from the Sri Aurobindo Birth Centenary Library
from Volume 18 and 19, The Life Divine
Book Two, Chapter Twenty-Five, “The Triple Transformation” (Part 1 of 3)
A conscious being is the centre of the self, who rules past and future; he
is like a fire without smoke…. That, one must disengage with patience
from one’s own body.
Katha Upanishad II.1.12,13; II.3.17.
An intuition in the heart sees that truth.
Rig Veda I.24.12.
I abide in the spiritual being and from there destroy the darkness born of
ignorance with the shining lamp of knowledge.
Gita X.11.
These rays are directed downwards, their foundation is above: may they be
set deep within us…. O Varuna, here awake, make wide thy reign; may we
abide in the law of thy workings and be blameless before the Mother
Infinite.
Rig Veda I.24.7,11,15.
The Swan that settles in the purity… born of the Truth, — itself the
Truth, the Vast.
Katha Upanishad II.2. 2.
IF IT is the sole intention of Nature in the evolution of the spiritual man
to awaken him to the supreme Reality and release him from herself, or from
the Ignorance in which she as the Power of the Eternal has masked herself, by
a departure into a higher status of being elsewhere, if this step in the
evolution is a close and an exit, then in the essence her work has been
already accomplished and there is nothing more to be done. The ways have been
built, the capacity to follow them has been developed, the goal or last
height of the creation is manifest; all that is left is for each soul to
reach individually the right stage and turn of its development, enter into
the spiritual ways and pass by its own chosen path out of this inferior
existence. But we have supposed that there is a farther intention, — not
only a revela-tion of the Spirit, but a radical and integral transformation
of Nature. There is a will in her to effectuate a true manifestation of the
embodied life of the Spirit, to complete what she has begun by a passage from
the Ignorance to the Knowledge, to throw off her mask and to reveal herself
as the luminous Consciousness-Force carrying in her the eternal Existence and
its universal Delight of being. It then becomes obvious that there is
something not yet accomplished, there becomes clear to view the much that
has still to be done, bhuri aspasta kartvam; there is a height still to be
reached, a wideness still to be covered by the eye of vision, the wing of
the will, the self-affirmation of the Spirit in the material universe. What
the evolutionary Power has done is to make a few individuals aware of their
souls, conscious of their selves, aware of the eternal being that they are,
to put them into communion with the Divinity or the Reality which is
concealed by her appearances: a certain change of nature prepares,
accompanies or follows upon this illumination, but it is not the complete
and radical change which establishes a secure and settled new principle, a
new creation, a permanent new order of being in the field of terrestrial
Nature. The spiritual man has evolved, but not the supramental being who
shall thenceforward be the leader of that Nature.
This is because the principle of spirituality has yet to affirm itself
in its own complete right and sovereignty; it has been up till now a power
for the mental being to escape from itself or to refine and raise itself to
a spiritual poise, it has availed for the release of the Spirit from mind
and for the enlargement of the being in a spiritualised mind and heart, but
not, — or rather not yet sufficiently, — for the self-affirmation of the
Spirit in its own dynamic and sovereign mastery free from the mind’s
limitations and from the mental instrumentation. The development of another
instrumentation has begun, but has yet to become total and effective; it has
besides to cease to be a purely individual self-creation in an original
Ignorance, something supernormal to earth-life that must always be acquired
as an individual achievement by a difficult endeavour. It must become the
normal nature of a new type of being; as Mind is established here on a basis
of Ignorance seeking for Knowledge and growing into Knowledge, so Supermind
must be established here on a basis of Knowledge growing into its own
greater Light. But this cannot be so long as the spiritual-mental being has
not risen fully to Supermind and brought down its powers into terrestrial
existence. For the gulf between Mind and Supermind has to be bridged, the
closed passages opened and roads of ascent and descent created where there
is now a void and a silence. This can be done only by the triple
transformation to which we have already made a passing reference: there must
first be the psychic change, the conversion of our whole present nature into
a soul-instrumentation; on that or along with that there must be the
spiritual change, the descent of a higher Light, Knowledge, Power, Force,
Bliss, Purity into the whole being, even into the lowest recesses of the
life and body, even into the darkness of our subconscience; last, there must
supervene the supramental transmutation, — there must take place as the
crowning movement the ascent into the Supermind and the transforming descent
of the supramental Consciousness into our entire being and nature.
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 ever-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 activities 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 beautiful, 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 consciousness 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, sometimes 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 consciousness, 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.
This slow development can be aided by the mind’s clear perception and
insistence on something within that survives the death of the body and an
effort to know its nature. But at first this knowledge is impeded by the
fact that there are many elements in us, many formations which present
themselves as soul-elements and can be mistaken for the psyche. In the early
Greek and some other traditions about the after-life, the descriptions
given show very clearly that what was then mistaken for the soul was a
subconscious formation, a subphysical impression-mould or shadow-form of the
being or else a wraith or ghost of the personality. This ghost, which is
mistakenly called the spirit, is sometimes a vital formation reproducing the
man’s characteristics, his surface life-mannerisms, sometimes a
subtle-physical prolongation of the surface form of the mind-shell: at best
it is a sheath of the life-personality which still remains in the front for
some time after the departure from the body. Apart from these confusions
born of an after-death contact with discarded phantasms or remnants of the
sheaths of the personality, the difficulty is due to our ignorance of the
subliminal parts of our nature and the form and powers of the conscious
being or Purusha which preside over their action; owing to this inexperience
we can easily mistake something of the inner mind or vital self for the
psychic. For as Being is one yet multiple, so also the same law prevails in
ourselves and our members; the Spirit, the Purusha is one but it adapts
itself to the formations of Nature. Over each grade of our being a power of
the Spirit presides; we have within us and discover when we go deep enough
inwards a mind-self, a life-self, a physical self; there is a being of mind,
a mental Purusha, expressing something of itself on our surface in the
thoughts, perceptions, activities of our mind-nature, a being of life which
expresses something of itself in the impulses, feelings, sensations,
desires, external life-activities of our vital nature, a physical being, a
being of the body which expresses something of itself in the instincts,
habits, formulated activities of our physical nature. These beings or part
selves of the self in us are powers of the Spirit and therefore not limited
by their temporary expression, for what is thus formulated is only a fragment
of its possibilities; but the expression creates a temporary mental, vital
or physical personality which grows and develops even as the psychic being
or soul-personality grows and develops within us. Each has its own distinct
nature, its influence, its action on the whole of us; but on our surface all
these influences and all this action, as they come up, mingle and create an
aggregate surface being which is a composite, an amalgam of them all, an
outer persistent and yet shifting and mobile formation for the purposes of
this life and its limited experience.
But this aggregate is, because of its composition, a heterogeneous
compound, not a single harmonious and homogeneous whole. This is the reason
why there is a constant confusion and even a conflict in our members which
our mental reason and will are moved to control and harmonise and have often
much difficulty in creating out of their confusion or conflict some kind of
order and guidance; even so, ordinarily, we drift too much or are driven by
the stream of our nature and act from whatever in it comes uppermost at the
time and seizes the instruments of thought and action, — even our seemingly
deliberate choice is more of an automatism than we imagine; our
co-ordination of our multifarious elements and of our consequent thoughts,
feelings, impulses, actions by the reason and will is incomplete and a
half-measure. In animal being Nature acts by her own mental and vital
intuitions; she works out an order by the compulsion of habit and instinct
which the animal implicitly obeys, so that the shiftings of its
consciousness do not matter. But man cannot altogether act in the same way
without forfeiting his prerogative of manhood; he cannot leave his being to
be a chaos of instincts and impulses regulated by the automatism of Nature:
mind has become conscious in him and is therefore self-compelled to make
some attempt, however elementary in many, to see and control and in the end
more and more perfectly harmonise the manifold components, the different and
conflicting tendencies that seem to make up his surface being. He does
succeed in setting up a sort of regulated chaos or ordered confusion in him,
or at least succeeds in thinking that he is directing himself by his mind
and will, even though in fact that direction is only partial; for not only a
disparate consortium of habitual motive-forces but also newly emergent vital
and physical tendencies and impulses, not always calculable or controllable,
and many incoherent and inharmonious mental elements use his reason and will,
enter into and determine his self-building, his nature-development, his life
action. Man is in his self a unique Person, but he is also in his
manifestation of self a multiperson; he will never succeed in being master of
himself until the Person imposes itself on his multipersonality and governs
it: but this can only be imperfectly done by the surface mental will and
reason; it can be perfectly done only if he goes within and finds whatever
central being is by its predominant influence at the head of all his
expression and action. In inmost truth it is his soul that is this central
being, but in outer fact it is often one or other of the part beings in him
that rules, and this representative of the soul, this deputy self he can
mistake for the inmost soul-principle.
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THE LIFE DIVINE, by Sri Aurobindo: Book Two, Chapter Twenty-Five, “The Triple Transformation” (Part 2 of 3)
Book Two, Chapter Twenty-Five, “The Triple Transformation” (Part 2 of 3)
This rule of different selves in us is at the root of the stages of
the development of human personality which we have already had occasion to
differentiate, and we can reconsider them now from the point of view of the
government of the nature by the inner principle. In some human beings it is
the physical Purusha, the being of body, who dominates the mind, will and
action; there is then created the physical man mainly occupied with his
corporeal life and habitual needs, impulses, life-habits, mind-habits,
body-habits, looking very little or not at all beyond that, subordinating
and restricting all his other tendencies and possibilities to that narrow
formation. But even in the physical man there are other elements and he
cannot live altogether as the human animal concerned with birth and death
and procreation and the satisfaction of common impulses and desires and the
maintenance of the life and the body: this is his normal type of
personality, but it is crossed, however feebly, with influences by which he
can proceed, if they are developed, to a higher human evolution. If the
inner subtle-physical Purusha insists, he can arrive at the idea of a finer,
more beautiful and perfect physical life and hope or attempt to realise it
in his own or in the collective or group existence. In others it is the
vital self, the being of life, who dominates and rules the mind, the will,
the action; then is created the vital man, concerned with self-affirmation,
self-aggrandisement, life-enlargement, satisfaction of ambition and passion
and impulse and desire, the claims of his ego, domination, power,
excitement, battle and struggle, inner and outer adventure: all else is
incidental or subordinated to this movement and building and expression of
the vital ego. But still in the vital man too there are or can be other
elements of a growing mental or spiritual character, even if these happen to
be less developed than his life-personality and life-power. The nature of
the vital man is more active, stronger and more mobile, more turbulent and
chaotic, often to the point of being quite unregulated, than that of the
physical man who holds on to the soil and has a certain material poise and
balance, but it is more kinetic and creative: for the element of the vital
being is not earth but air; it has more movement, less status. A vigorous
vital mind and will can grasp and govern the kinetic vital energies, but it
is more by a forceful compulsion and constraint than by a harmonisation of
the being. If, however, a strong vital personality, mind and will can get the
reasoning intelligence to give it a firm support and be its minister, then
a certain kind of forceful formation can be made, more or less balanced but
always powerful, successful and effective, which can impose itself on the
nature and environment and arrive at a strong self-affirmation in life and
action. This is the second step of harmonised formulation possible in the
ascent of the nature.
At a higher stage of the evolution of personality the being of mind
may rule; there is then created the mental man who lives predominantly in
the mind as the others live in the vital or the physical nature. The mental
man tends to subordinate to his mental self-expression, mental aims, mental
interests or to a mental idea or ideal the rest of his being: because of the
difficulty of this subordination and its potent effect when achieved, it is
at once more difficult for him and easier to arrive at a harmony of his
nature. It is easier because the mental will once in control can convince by
the power of the reasoning intelligence and at the same time dominate,
compress or suppress the life and the body and their demands, arrange and
harmonise them, force them to be its instruments, even reduce them to a
minimum so that they shall not disturb the mental life or pull it down from
its ideative or idealising movement. It is more difficult because life and
body are the first powers and, if they are in the least strong, can impose
themselves with an almost irresistible insistence on the mental ruler. Man
is a mental being and the mind is the leader of his life and body; but this
is a leader who is much led by his followers and has sometimes no other will
than what they impose on him. Mind in spite of its power is often impotent
before the inconscient and subconscient which obscure its clarity and carry
it away on the tide of instinct or impulse; in spite of its clarity it is
fooled by vital and emotional suggestions into giving sanction to ignorance
and error, to wrong thought and to wrong action, or it is obliged to look on
while the nature follows what it knows to be wrong, dangerous or evil. Even
when it is strong and clear and dominant, Mind, though it imposes a certain,
a considerable mentalised harmony, cannot integrate the whole being and
nature. These harmonisations by an inferior control are, besides,
inconclusive, because it is one part of the nature which dominates and
fulfils itself while the others are coerced and denied their fullness. They
can be steps on the way, but not final; therefore in most men there is no
such sole dominance and effected partial harmony, but only a predominance
and for the rest an unstable equilibrium of a personality half formed, half
in formation, sometimes a disequilibrium or unbalance due to the lack of a
central government or the disturbance of a formerly achieved partial poise.
All must be transitional until a first, though not a final, true
harmonisation is achieved by finding our real centre. For the true central
being is the soul, but this being stands back and in most human natures is
only the secret witness or, one might say, a constitutional ruler who allows
his ministers to rule for him, delegates to them his empire, silently
assents to their decisions and only now and then puts in a word which they
can at any moment override and act otherwise. But this is so long as the
soul-personality put forward by the psychic entity is not yet sufficiently
developed; when this is strong enough for the inner entity to impose itself
through it, then the soul can come forward and control the nature. It is by
the coming forward of this true monarch and his taking up of the reins of
government that there can take place a real harmonisation of our being and
our life.
A first condition of the soul’s complete emergence is a direct contact
in the surface being with the spiritual Reality. Because it comes from that,
the psychic element in us turns always towards whatever in phenomenal Nature
seems to belong to a higher Reality and can be accepted as its sign and
character. At first, it seeks this Reality through the good, the true, the
beautiful, through all that is pure and fine and high and noble: but
although this touch through outer signs and characters can modify and
prepare the nature, it cannot entirely or most inwardly and profoundly
change it. For such an inmost change the direct contact with the Reality
itself is indispensable since nothing else can so deeply touch the
foundations of our being and stir it or cast the nature by its stir into a
ferment of transmutation. Mental representations, emotional and dynamic
figures have their use and value; Truth, Good and Beauty are in themselves
primary and potent figures of the Reality, and even in their forms as seen
by the mind, as felt by the heart, as realised in the life can be lines of
an ascent: but it is in a spiritual substance and being of them and of itself
that That which they represent has to come into our experience.
The soul may attempt to achieve this contact mainly through the
thinking mind as intermediary and instrument; it puts a psychic impression
on the intellect and the larger mind of insight and intuitional intelligence
and turns them in that direction. At its highest the thinking mind is drawn
always towards the impersonal; in its search it becomes conscious of a
spiritual essence, an impersonal Reality which expresses itself in all these
outward signs and characters but is more than any formation or manifesting
figure. It feels something of which it becomes intimately and invisibly
aware, — a supreme Truth, a supreme Good, a supreme Beauty, a supreme
Purity, a supreme Bliss; it bears the increasing touch, less and less
impalpable and abstract, more and more spiritually real and concrete, the
touch and pressure of an Eternity and Infinity which is all this that is and
more. There is a pressure from this Impersonality that seeks to mould the
whole mind into a form of itself; at the same time the impersonal secret and
law of things becomes more and more visible. The mind develops into the
mind of the sage, at first the high mental thinker, then the spiritual sage
who has gone beyond the abstractions of thought to the beginnings of a
direct experience. As a result the mind becomes pure, large, tranquil,
impersonal; there is a similar tranquillising influence on the parts of
life: but otherwise the result may remain incomplete; for the mental change
leads more naturally towards an inner status and an outer quietude, but,
poised in this purifying quietism, not drawn like the vital parts towards a
discovery of new life-energies, does not press for a full dynamic effect on
the nature.
A higher endeavour through the mind does not change this balance; for
the tendency of the spiritualised mind is to go on upwards and, since above
itself the mind loses its hold on forms, it is into a vast formless and
featureless impersonality that it enters. It becomes aware of the unchanging
Self, the sheer Spirit, the pure bareness of an essential Existence, the
formless Infinite and the nameless Absolute. This culmination can be
arrived at more directly by tending immediately beyond all forms and
figures, beyond all ideas of good or evil or true or false or beautiful or
unbeautiful to That which exceeds all dualities, to the experience of a
supreme oneness, infinity, eternity or other ineffable sublimation of the
mind’s ultimate and extreme percept of Self or Spirit. A spiritualised
consciousness is achieved and the life falls quiet, the body ceases to need
and to clamour, the soul itself merges into the spiritual silence. But this
transformation through the mind does not give us the integral transformation;
the psychic transmutation is replaced by a spiritual change on the rare and
high summits, but this is not the complete divine dynamisation of Nature.
A second approach made by the soul to the direct contact is through
the heart: this is its own more close and rapid way because its occult seat
is there, just behind in the heart-centre, in close contact with the
emotional being in us; it is consequently through the emotions that it can
act best at the beginning with its native power, with its living force of
concrete experience. It is through a love and adoration of the All-Beautiful
and All-Blissful, the All-Good, the True, the spiritual Reality of love,
that the approach is made; the aesthetic and emotional parts join together
to offer the soul, the life, the whole nature to that which they worship.
This approach through adoration can get its full power and impetus only when
the mind goes beyond impersonality to the awareness of a supreme Personal
Being: then all becomes intense, vivid, concrete; the heart’s emotion,
feeling, spiritualised sense reach their absolute; an entire self-giving
becomes possible, imperative. The nascent spiritual man makes his appearance
in the emotional nature as the devotee, the bhakta; if, in addition, he
becomes directly aware of his soul and its dictates, unites his emotional
with his psychic personality and changes his life and vital parts by
purity, God-ecstasy, the love of God and men and all creatures into a thing
of spiritual beauty, full of divine light and good, he develops into the
saint and reaches the highest inner experience and most considerable change
of nature proper to this way of approach to the Divine Being. But for the
purpose of an integral transformation this too is not enough; there must be
a transmutation of the thinking mind and all the vital and physical parts of
consciousness in their own character.
This larger change can be partly attained by adding to the experiences
of the heart a consecration of the pragmatic will which must succeed in
carrying with it, — for otherwise it cannot be effective, — the adhesion
of the dynamic vital part which supports the mental dynamis and is our first
instrument of outer action. This consecration of the will in works proceeds
by a gradual elimination of the ego-will and its motive-power of desire;
the ego subjects itself to some higher law and finally effaces itself, seems
not to exist or exists only to serve a higher Power or a higher Truth or to
offer its will and acts to the Divine Being as an instrument. The law of
being and action or the light of Truth which then guides the seeker, may be
a clarity or power or principle which he perceives on the highest height of
which his mind is capable; or it may be a truth of the divine Will which he
feels present and working within him or guiding him by a Light or a Voice or
a Force or a divine Person or Presence. In the end by this way one arrives
at a consciousness in which one feels the Force or Presence acting within
and moving or governing all the actions and the personal will is entirely
surrendered or identified with that greater Truth-Will, Truth-Power or
Truth-Presence. A combination of all these three approaches, the approach of
the mind, the approach of the will, the approach of the heart, creates a
spiritual or psychic condition of the surface being and nature in which
there is a larger and more complex openness to the psychic light within us
and to the spiritual Self or the Ishwara, to the Reality now felt above and
enveloping and penetrating us. In the nature there is a more powerful and
many-sided change, a spiritual building and self-creation, the appearance of
a composite perfection of the saint, the selfless worker and the man of
spiritual knowledge.
But, for this change to arrive at its widest totality and profound
completeness, the consciousness has to shift its centre and its static and
dynamic position from the surface to the inner being; it is there that we
must find the foundation for our thought, life and action. For to stand
outside on our surface and to receive from the inner being and follow its
intimations is not a sufficient transformation; one must cease to be the
surface personality and become the inner Person, the Purusha. But this is
difficult, first because the outer nature opposes the movement and clings to
its normal accustomed poise and externalised way of existence and, in
addition, because there is a long way from the surface to the depths in
which the psychic entity is veiled from us, and this intervening space is
filled with a subliminal nature and nature-movements which are not by any
means all of them favourable to the completion of the inward movement. The
outer nature has to undergo a change of poise, a quieting, a purification
and fine mutation of its substance and energy by which the many obstacles in
it rarefy, drop away or otherwise disappear; it then becomes possible to
pass through to the depths of our being and from the depths so reached a new
consciousness can be formed, both behind the exterior self and in it,
joining the depths to the surface. There must grow up within us or there
must manifest a consciousness more and more open to the deeper and the
higher being, more and more laid bare to the cosmic Self and Power and to
what comes down from the Transcendence, turned to a higher Peace, permeable
to a greater light, force and ecstasy, a consciousness that exceeds the
small personality and surpasses the limited light and experience of the
surface mind, the limited force and aspiration of the normal
life-consciousness, the obscure and limited responsiveness of the body.
Even before the tranquillising purification of the outer nature has
been effected or before it is sufficient, one can still break down the wall
screening our inner being from our outer awareness by a strong force of call
and aspiration, a vehement will or violent effort or an effective discipline
or process; but this may be a premature movement and is not without its
serious dangers. In entering within one may find oneself amidst a chaos of
unfamiliar and supernormal experiences to which one has not the key or a
press of subliminal or cosmic forces, subconscient, mental, vital,
subtle-physical, which may unduly sway or chaotically drive the being,
encircle it in a cave of darkness, or keep it wandering in a wilderness of
glamour, allurement, deception, or push it into an obscure battlefield full
of secret and treacherous and misleading or open and violent oppositions;
beings and voices and influences may appear to the inner sense and vision
and hearing claiming to be the Divine Being or His messengers or Powers and
Godheads of the Light or guides of the path to realisation, while in truth
they are of a very different character. If there is too much egoism in the
nature of the seeker or a strong passion or an excessive ambition, vanity or
other dominating weakness, or an obscurity of the mind or a vacillating will
or a weakness of the life-force or an unsteadiness in it or want of
balance, he is likely to be seized on through these deficiencies and to be
frustrated or to deviate, misled from the true way of the inner life and
seeking into false paths, or to be left wandering about in an intermediate
chaos of experiences and fail to find his way out into the true realisation.
These perils were well-known to a past spiritual experience and have been
met by imposing the necessity of initiation, of discipline, of methods of
purification and testing by ordeal, of an entire submission to the
directions of the path-finder or path-leader, one who has realised the Truth
and himself possesses and is able to communicate the light, the experience,
a guide who is strong to take by the hand and carry over difficult passages
as well as to instruct and point out the way. But even so the dangers will
be there and can only be surmounted if there is or there grows up a complete
sincerity, a will for purity, a readiness for obedience to the Truth, for
surrender to the Highest, a readiness to lose or to subject to a divine yoke
the limiting and self-affirming ego. These things are the sign that the
true will for realisation, for conversion of the consciousness, for
transformation is there, the necessary stage of the evolution has been
reached: in that condition the defects of nature which belong to the human
being cannot be a permanent obstacle to the change from the mental to the
spiritual status; the process may never be entirely easy, but the way will
have been made open and practicable.
One effective way often used to facilitate this entry into the inner
self is the separation of the Purusha, the conscious being, from the
Prakriti, the formulated nature. If one stands back from the mind and its
activities so that they fall silent at will or go on as a surface movement
of which one is the detached and disinterested witness, it becomes possible
eventually to realise oneself as the inner Self of mind, the true and pure
mental being, the Purusha; by similarly standing back from the
life-activities, it is possible to realise oneself as the inner Self of
life, the true and pure vital being, the Purusha; there is even a Self of
body of which, by standing back from the body and its demands and
activities and entering into a silence of the physical consciousness
watching the action of its energy, it is possible to become aware, a true
and pure physical being, the Purusha. So too, by standing back from all
these activities of nature successively or together, it becomes possible to
realise one’s inner being as the silent impersonal self, the witness
Purusha. This will lead to a spiritual realisation and liberation, but will
not necessarily bring about a transformation; for the Purusha, satisfied to
be free and himself, may leave the nature, the Prakriti, to exhaust its
accumulated impetus by an unsupported action, a mechanical continuance not
renewed and reinforced or vivified and prolonged by his consent, and use
this rejection as a means of withdrawing from all nature. The Purusha has to
become not only the witness but the knower and source, the master of all the
thought and action, and this can only be partially done so long as one
remains on the mental level or has still to use the ordinary instrumentation
of mind, life and body. A certain mastery can indeed be achieved, but
mastery is not transformation; the change made by it cannot be sufficient to
be integral: for that it is essential to get back, beyond mind-being,
life-being, body-being, still more deeply inward to the psychic entity
inmost and profoundest within us, — or else to open to the superconscient
highest domains. For this penetration into the luminous crypt of the soul
one has to get through all the intervening vital stuff to the psychic centre
within us, however long, tedious or difficult may be the process. The method
of detachment from the insistence of all mental and vital and physical
claims and calls and impulsions, a concentration in the heart, austerity,
self-purification and rejection of the old mind-movements and life-movements,
rejection of the ego of desire, rejection of false needs and false habits,
are all useful aids to this difficult passage: but the strongest, most
central way is to found all such or other methods on a self-offering and
surrender of ourselves and of our parts of nature to the Divine Being, the
Ishwara. A strict obedience to the wise and intuitive leading of a Guide is
also normal and necessary for all but a few specially gifted seekers.
Click to continue reading:
THE LIFE DIVINE, by Sri Aurobindo: Book Two, Chapter Twenty-Five, “The Triple Transformation” (Part 3 of 3)
Book Two, Chapter Twenty-Five, “The Triple Transformation” (Part 3 of 3)
As the crust of the outer nature cracks, as the walls of inner
separation break down, the inner light gets through, the inner fire burns
in the heart, the substance of the nature and the stuff of consciousness
refine to a greater subtlety and purity, and the deeper psychic experiences,
those which are not solely of an inner mental or inner vital character,
become possible in this subtler, purer, finer substance; the soul begins to
unveil itself, the psychic personality reaches its full stature. The soul,
the psychic entity, then manifests itself as the central being which upholds
mind and life and body and supports all the other powers and functions of
the Spirit; it takes up its greater function as the guide and ruler of the
nature. A guidance, a governance begins from within which exposes every
movement to the light of Truth, repels what is false, obscure, opposed to
the divine realisation: every region of the being, every nook and corner of
it, every movement, formation, direction, inclination of thought, will,
emotion, sensation, action, reaction, motive, disposition, propensity,
desire, habit of the conscious or subconscious physical, even the most
concealed, camouflaged, mute, recondite, is lighted up with the unerring
psychic light, their confusions dissipated, their tangles disentangled,
their obscurities, deceptions, self-deceptions precisely indicated and
removed; all is purified, set right, the whole nature harmonised, modulated
in the psychic key, put in spiritual order. This process may be rapid or
tardy according to the amount of obscurity and resistance still left in the
nature, but it goes on unfalteringly so long as it is not complete. As a
final result the whole conscious being is made perfectly apt for spiritual
experience of every kind, turned towards spiritual truth of thought,
feeling, sense, action, tuned to the right responses, delivered from the
darkness and stubbornness of the tamasic inertia, the turbidities and
turbulences and impurities of the rajasic passion and restless unharmonised
kinetism, the enlightened rigidities and sattwic limitations or poised
balancements of constructed equilibrium which are the character of the
Ignorance.
This is the first result, but the second is a free inflow of all kinds
of spiritual experience, experience of the Self, experience of the Ishwara
and the Divine Shakti, experience of cosmic consciousness, a direct touch
with cosmic forces and with the occult movements of universal Nature, a
psychic sympathy and unity and inner communication and interchanges of all
kinds with other beings and with Nature, illuminations of the mind by
knowledge, illuminations of the heart by love and devotion and spiritual
joy and ecstasy, illuminations of the sense and the body by higher
experience, illuminations of dynamic action in the truth and largeness of a
purified mind and heart and soul, the certitudes of the divine light and
guidance, the joy and power of the divine force working in the will and the
conduct. These experiences are the result of an opening outward of the inner
and inmost being and nature; for then there comes into play the soul’s
power of unerring inherent consciousness, its vision, its touch on things
which is superior to any mental cognition; there is there, native to the
psychic consciousness in its pure working, an immediate sense of the world
and its beings, a direct inner contact with them and a direct contact with
the Self and with the Divine, — a direct knowledge, a direct sight of
Truth and of all truths, a direct penetrating spiritual emotion and feeling,
a direct intuition of right will and right action, a power to rule and to
create an order of the being not by the gropings of the superficial self,
but from within, from the inner truth of self and things and the occult
realities of Nature.
Some of these experiences can come by an opening of the inner mental
and vital being, the inner and larger and subtler mind and heart and life
within us, without any full emergence of the soul, the psychic entity, since
there too there is a power of direct contact of consciousness: but the
experience might then be of a mixed character; for there could be an
emergence not only of the subliminal knowledge but of the subliminal
ignorance. An insufficient expansion of the being, a limitation by mental
idea, by narrow and selective emotion or by the form of the temperament so
that there would be only an imperfect self-creation and action and not the
free soul-emergence, could easily occur. In the absence of any or of a
complete psychic emergence, experiences of certain kinds, experiences of
greater knowledge and force, a surpassing of the ordinary limits, might lead
to a magnified ego and even bring about instead of an out-flowering of what
is divine or spiritual an uprush of the titanic or demoniac, or might call
in agencies and powers which, though not of this disastrous type, are of a
powerful but inferior cosmic character. But the rule and guidance of the
soul brings into all experience the tendency of light, of integration, of
harmony and intimate rightness which is native to the psychic essence. A
psychic or, more widely speaking, a psycho-spiritual transformation of this
kind would be already a vast change of our mental human nature.
But all this change and all this experience, though psychic and
spiritual in essence and character, would still be, in its parts of
life-effectuation, on the mental, vital and physical level; its dynamic
spiritual outcome (1) The psychic and the spiritual opening with their
experiences and consequences can lead away from life or to a Nirvana; but
they are here being considered solely as steps in a transformation of the
nature.would be a flowering of the soul in mind and life and body, but in
act and form it would be circumscribed within the limitations, — however
enlarged, uplifted and rarefied, — of an inferior instrumentation. It would
be a reflected and modified manifestation of things whose full reality,
intensity, largeness, oneness and diversity of truth and power and delight
are above us, above mind and therefore above any perfection, within mind’s
own formula, of the foundations or superstructure of our present nature. A
highest spiritual transformation must intervene on the psychic or
psycho-spiritual change; the psychic movement inward to the inner being, the
Self or Divinity within us, must be completed by an opening upward to a
supreme spiritual status or a higher existence. This can be done by our
opening into what is above us, by an ascent of consciousness into the
ranges of overmind and supramental nature in which the sense of Self and
Spirit is ever unveiled and permanent and in which the self-luminous
instrumentation of the Self and Spirit is not restricted or divided as in our
mind-nature, life-nature, body-nature. This also the psychic change makes
possible; for as it opens us to the cosmic consciousness now hidden from us
by many walls of limiting individuality, so also it opens us to what is now
superconscient to our normality because it is hidden from us by the strong,
hard and bright lid of mind, — mind constricting, dividing and separative.
The lid thins, is slit, breaks asunder or opens and disappears under the
pressure of the psycho-spiritual change and the natural urge of the new
spiritualised consciousness towards that of which it is an expression here.
This effectuation of an aperture and its consequences may not at all take
place if there is only a partial psychic emergence satisfied with the
experience of the Divine Reality in the normal degrees of the spiritualised
mind: but if there is any awakening to the existence of these higher
supernormal levels, then an aspiration towards them may break the lid or
operate a rift in it. This may happen long before the psycho-spiritual
change is complete or even before it has well begun or proceeded far,
because the psychic personality has become aware and has an eager
concentration towards the superconscience. An early illumination from above
or a rending of the upper velamen can come as an outcome of aspiration or
some inner readiness, or it may even come uncalled for or not called for by
any conscious part of the mind, — perhaps by a secret subliminal necessity
or by an action or pressure from the higher levels, by something which is
felt as the touch of the Divine Being, the touch of the Spirit, — and its
results can be exceedingly powerful. But if it is brought about by a
premature pressure from below, it can be attended with difficulties and
dangers which are absent when the full psychic emergence precedes this first
admission to the superior ranges of our spiritual evolution. The choice,
however, does not always rest with our will, for the operations of the
spiritual evolution in us are very various, and according to the line it
has followed will be the turn taken at any critical phase by the action of
the Consciousness-Force in its urge towards a higher self-manifestation and
formation of our existence.
1. The psychic and the spiritual opening with their experiences and consequences can lead
away from life or to a Nirvana; but they are here being considered solely as steps in a
transformation of the nature.
If the rift in the lid of mind is made, what happens is an opening of
vision to something above us or a rising up towards it or a descent of its
powers into our being. What we see by the opening of vision is an Infinity
above us, an eternal Presence or an infinite Existence, an infinity of
consciousness, an infinity of bliss, — a boundless Self, a boundless Light,
a boundless Power, a boundless Ecstasy. It may be that for a long time all
that is obtained is the occasional or frequent or constant vision of it and
a longing and aspiration, but without anything further, because, although
something in the mind, heart or other part of the being has opened to this
experience, the lower nature as a whole is too heavy and obscure as yet for
more. But there may be, instead of this first wide awareness from below or
subsequently to it, an ascension of the mind to heights above: the nature
of these heights we may not know or clearly discern, but some consequence of
the ascent is felt; there is often too an awareness of infinite ascension
and return but no record or translation of that higher state. This is
because it has been superconscient to mind and therefore mind, when it rises
into it, is unable at first to retain there its power of conscious
discernment and defining experience. But when this power begins to awake and
act, when mind becomes by degrees conscious in what was to it
superconscient, then there begins a knowledge and experience of superior
planes of existence. The experience is in accord with that which is brought
to us by the first opening of vision: the mind rises into a higher plane of
pure Self, silent, tranquil, illimitable; or it rises into regions of Light
or of Felicity, or into planes where it feels an infinite Power or a divine
Presence or experiences the contact of a divine Love or Beauty or the
atmosphere of a wider and greater and luminous Knowledge. In the return the
spiritual impression abides; but the mental record is often blurred and
remains as a vague or a fragmentary memory; the lower consciousness from
which the ascent took place falls back to what it was, with only the
addition of an unkept or a remembered but no longer dynamic experience. In
time the ascent comes to be made at will and the consciousness brings back
and retains some effect or some gain of its temporary sojourn in these
higher countries of the Spirit. These ascents take place for many in trance,
but are perfectly possible in a concentration of the waking consciousness
or, where that consciousness has become sufficiently psychic, at any
unconcentrated moment by an upward attraction or affinity. But these two
types of contact with the superconscient, though they can be powerfully
illuminating, ecstatic or liberating, are by themselves insufficiently
effective: for the full spiritual transformation more is needed, a permanent
ascension from the lower into the higher consciousness and an effectual
permanent descent of the higher into the lower nature.
This is the third motion, the descent which is essential for bringing
the permanent ascension, an increasing inflow from above, an experience of
reception and retention of the descending Spirit or its powers and elements
of consciousness. This experience of descent can take place as a result of
the other two movements or automatically before either has happened,
through a sudden rift in the lid or a percolation, a downpour or an influx.
A light descends and touches or envelops or penetrates the lower being, the
mind, the life or the body; or a presence or a power or a stream of
knowledge pours in waves or currents, or there is a flood of bliss or a
sudden ecstasy; the contact with the superconscient has been established.
For such experiences repeat themselves till they become normal, familiar and
well-understood, revelatory of their contents and their significance which
may have at first been involved and wrapped into secrecy by the figure of
the covering experience. For a knowledge from above begins to descend,
frequently, constantly, then uninterruptedly, and to manifest in the mind’s
quietude or silence; intuitions and inspirations, revelations born of a
greater sight, a higher truth and wisdom, enter into the being, a luminous
intuitive discrimination works which dispels all darkness of understanding
or dazzling confusions, puts all in order; a new consciousness begins to
form, the mind of a high wide self-existent thinking knowledge or an
illumined or an intuitive or an overmental consciousness with new forces of
thought or sight and a greater power of direct spiritual realisation which
is more than thought or sight, a greater becoming in the spiritual
substance of our present being; the heart and the sense become subtle,
intense, large to embrace all existence, to see God, to feel and hear and
touch the Eternal, to make a deeper and closer unity of self and the world
in a transcendent realisation. Other decisive experiences, other changes of
consciousness determine themselves which are corollaries and consequences
of this fundamental change. No limit can be fixed to this revolution; for
it is in its nature an invasion by the Infinite.
This, effected little by little or in a succession of great and swift definitive experiences, is the
process of the spiritual transformation. It achieves itself and culminates in an upward ascent
often repeated by which in the end the consciousness fixes itself on a higher plane and from
there sees and governs the mind, life and body; it achieves itself also in an increasing descent of
the powers of the higher consciousness and knowledge which becomes more and more the
whole normal consciousness and knowledge. A light and power, a knowledge and force are felt
which first take possession of the mind and remould it, afterwards of the life=part and remould
that, finally of the little physical consciousness and leave it no longer little but wide and plastic
and even infinite. For this new consciousness has itself the nature of infinity: it brings to us the
abiding spiritual sense and awareness of the Infinite and Eternal with a great largeness of the
nature and a breaking down of its limitations; immortality becomes no longer a belief or an
experience but a normal self-awareness; the close presence of the Divine Being, his rule of the
world and of our self and natural members, his force working in us and everywhere, the peace
of the infinite, the joy of the Infinite are now concrete and constant in the being; in all sights and
forms one sees the Eternal, the Reality, in all sounds one hears it, in all touches feels it; there is
nothing else but its forms and personalities and manifestations; the joy or adoration of the heart,
the embrace of all existence, the unity of the spirit are abiding realities. The consciousness of
the mental creature is turning or has been already turned wholly into the consciousness of the
spiritual being. This is the second of the three transformations; uniting the manifested existence
with what is above it, it is the middle step of the three, the decisive transition of the spiritually
evolving nature.
If the spirit could from the first dwell securely on the superior heights and deal with a blank and
virgin stuff of mind and matter, a complete spiritual transformation might be rapid, even facile:
but the actual process of Nature is more difficult, the logic of her movement more manifold,
contorted, winding, comprehensive; she recognises all the data of the task she has set to herself
and is not satisfied with a summary triumph over her own complexities. Every part of our being
has to be taken in its own nature and character, with all the moulds and writings of the past still
there in it: each minutest portion and movement must either be destroyed and replaced if it is
unfit, or, if it is capable, transmuted into the truth of the higher being. If the psychic change is
complete, this can be done by a painless process, though still the programme must be long and
scrupulous and the progress deliberate; but otherwise one has to be satisfied with a partial result
or, if one’s own scrupulousness of perfection or hunger of the spirit is insatiable, consent to a
difficult, often painful and seemingly interminable action. For ordinarily the consciousness does
not rise to the summits except in the highest moments; it remains on the mental level and
receives descents from above, sometimes a single descent of some spiritual power that stays
and moulds the being into something predominatingly spiritual, or a succession of descents
bringing into it more and more of the spiritual status and dynamis: but unless one can live on the
highest height reached, there cannot be the complete or more integral change. If the psychic
mutation has not taken place, if there has been a premature pulling down of the higher Forces,
their contact may be too strong for the flawed and impure material of Nature and its immediate
fate may be that of the unbaked jar of the Veda which could not hold the divine Soma Wine; or
the descending influence may withdraw or be spilt because the nature cannot contain or keep it.
Again, if it is Power that descends, the egoistic mind or vital may try to seize on it for its own use
and a magnified ego or a hunting after powers and self-aggrandising masteries may be the
untoward result. The Ananda descending cannot be held if there is too much sexual impurity
creating an intoxicant or degrading mixture; the Power recedes, if there is ambition, vanity or
other aggressive form of lower self, the Light if there is an attachment to obscurity or to any form
of the Ignorance, the Presence if the chamber of the heart has not been made pure. Or some
undivine Force may try to seize hold, not of the Power itself, for that withdraws, but of the result
of force it leaves behind in the instrument and use it for the purposes of the Adversary. Even if
none of these more disastrous faults or errors should take place, still the numerous mistakes of
reception or the imperfections of the vessel may impede the transformation. The Power has to
come at intervals and work meanwhile behind the veil or hold itself back through long periods of
obscure assimilation or preparation of the recalcitrant parts of Nature; the Light has to work in
darkness or semi-darkness on the regions in us that are still in the Night. At any moment the
work may be stayed, personally for this life, because the nature is able to receive or assimilate
no more, — for it has reached the present limits of its capacity, — or because the mind may be
ready but the vital, when faced with a choice between the old life and the new, refuses, or if the
vital accepts, the body may prove too weak, unfit or flawed for the necessary change of its
consciousness and its dynamic transformation.
Moreover, the necessity of working out the change separately in each
part of the being in its own nature and character compels the consciousness
to descend into each in turn and act there according to its state and its
possibility. If the work were done from above, from some spiritual height,
there might be a sublimation or uplifting or the creation of a new structure
compelled by the sheer force of the influence from above: but this change
might not be accepted as native to itself by the lower being; it would not
be a total growth, an integral evolution, but a partial and imposed
formation, affecting or liberating some parts of the being, suppressing
others or leaving them as they were; a creation from outside the normal
nature, by imposition upon it, it could be durable in its entirety only as
long as there was a maintenance of the creating influence. A descent of
consciousness into the lower levels is therefore necessary, but in this way
also it is difficult to work out the full power of the higher principle;
there is a modification, dilution, diminution which keeps up an imperfection
and limitation in the results: the light of a greater knowledge comes down
but gets blurred and modified, its significance misinterpreted or its truth
mixed with mental and vital error, or the force, the power to fulfil itself
is not commensurate with its light. A light and power of the Overmind
working in its own full right and in its own sphere is one thing, the same
light working in the obscurity of the physical consciousness and under its
conditions is something quite different and, owing to dilution and mixture,
far inferior in its knowledge and force and results. A mutilated power, a
partial effect or hampered movement is the consequence.
This is indeed the reason of the slow and difficult emergence of the
Consciousness-Force in Nature: for Mind and Life have to descend into Matter
and suit themselves to its conditions; changed and diminished by the
obscurity and reluctant inertia of the substance and force in which they
work, they are not able to make a complete transformation of their material
into a fit instrument and a changed substance revelatory of their real and
native power. The Life-consciousness is unable to effectuate the greatness
and felicity of its mighty or beautiful impulses in the material existence;
its impetus fails it, its force of effectuation is inferior to the truth of
its conceptions, the form betrays the Life-intuition within it which it
tries to render into terms of Life-being. The Mind is unable to achieve its
high ideas in the medium of Life or Matter without deductions and
compromises which deprive them of their divinity; its clarities of knowledge
and will are not matched by its force to mould this inferior substance to
obey and express it: on the contrary, its own powers get affected, its will
is divided, its knowledge confused and clouded by the turbidities of life and
the incomprehensiveness of Matter. Neither Life nor Mind succeeds in
converting or perfecting the material existence, because they cannot attain
to their own full force in these conditions; they need to call in a higher
power to liberate and fulfil them. But the higher spiritual-mental powers
also undergo the same disability when they descend into Life and Matter; they
can do much more, achieve much luminous change, but the modification, the
limitation, the disparity between the consciousness that comes in and the
force of effectuation that it can mentalise and materialise, are constantly
there and the result is a diminished creation. The change made is often
extraordinary, there is even something which looks like a total conversion
and reversal of the state of consciousness and an uplifting of its movements,
but it is not dynamically absolute.
Only the Supermind can thus descend without losing its full power of
action; for its action is always intrinsic and automatic, its will and
knowledge identical and the result commensurate: its nature is a
self-achieving Truth-Consciousness and, if it limits itself or its working,
it is by choice and intention, not by compulsion; in the limits it chooses
its action and the results of its action are harmonious and inevitable.
Again, Overmind is, like Mind, a dividing principle, and its characteristic
operation is to work out in an independent formation a selected harmony; its
global action enables it indeed to create a harmony whole and perfect in
itself or to unite or fuse its harmonies together, to synthetise; but,
labouring under the restrictions of Mind, Life and Matter, it is obliged to
do it by sections and their joinings.
Its tendency of totality is hampered by its selective tendency which is
accentuated by the nature of the mental and life material in which it is
working here; what it can achieve is separate limited spiritual creations
each perfect in itself, but not the integral knowledge and its manifestation.
For this reason and because of the diminishing of its native light and power
it is unable to do fully what is needed and has to call in a greater power,
the supramental force, to liberate and fulfil it. As the psychic change has
to call in the spiritual to complete it, so the first spiritual change has
to call in the supramental transformation to complete it. For all these
steps forward are, like those before them, transitional; the whole radical
change in the evolution from a basis of Ignorance to a basis of Knowledge
can only come by the intervention of the supramental Power and its direct
action in earth-existence.
This then must be the nature of the third and final transformation
which finishes the passage of the soul through the Ignorance and bases its
consciousness, its life, its power and form of manifestation on a complete
and completely effective self-knowledge. The Truth-Consciousness, finding
evolutionary Nature ready, has to descend into her and enable her to liberate
the supramental principle within her; so must be created the supramental
and spiritual being as the first unveiled manifestation of the truth of the
Self and Spirit in the material universe.
Click to continue reading:
THE LIFE DIVINE, by Sri Aurobindo: Book Two, Chapter Twenty-Six, “The Ascent towards Supermind” (Part 1 of 5)