As you put in the daily effort to live consciously, you might begin to obtain, perhaps after many years, fleeting and unmistakable glimpses of the psychic being which sits veiled within. You might find a strong mental conviction overturned by a clairvoyant voice which emerges unbidden from the deepest recesses of the heart; you may feel your obstinate subconscious tendencies being dissolved by a warm fire glowing within; or you may momentarily perceive that it is indeed possible to enjoy a self-existent bliss whose source seems to be an inner light. These experiences cannot establish themselves permanently because there are rebellious tendencies in the external personality which take time to dissolve. The peculiar vagaries of the meandering psychic transformation are the subject of this article.
Psychic transformation. Flickr Creative Commons. Photo by Karolik. Click image for source
The birth of psychic discernment
Most people are so dead on the inside that when they engage in profanities or perverse conduct, they feel delight instead of sorrow. The delight that they experience is rajo-tamasic– it is born out of the clash of intensities and morbidity. This perception becomes reversed when the psychic being begins to come to the fore. Now you might experience an intense pain in your heart when you abuse someone or engage in other reprobate conduct. As the Mother once said, “you feel as though all the nerves of the head were being pulled and there is also something churning here (gesture) which hurts you, and you feel a great emptiness within and have heartburn, as though you had eaten something very bad – all this only because of some uselessly spoken words”[1]. This pain does not subside unless you have relinquished your malevolent thoughts or conduct. This is the first compelling proof that there is indeed a Divine Power that pervades the Universe and resides in the heart of all beings. Such incidents also unambiguously demonstrate that there is a law of Karma which binds all souls to one another. Instead of the long and inscrutable feedback cycle of Karma which you could previously never decipher, you now obtain instant feedback on your actions!
In the next exchange, a disciple relates how he found the psychic being exerting a weak but palpable and positive influence on his previously unchecked thought processes.
Nagin: Nowadays, I notice that when I do not check the useless thoughts and impulses, some part within feels a sense of uneasiness.
Sri Aurobindo: It may be something psychic-mental, that is, an influence of the psychic put out into the mind.
Nagin: When the psychic has put its influence into the mind, why is it so weak that it cannot prevent the wrong thoughts and impulses coming in, but simply tolerates them with an uneasy feeling?
Sri Aurobindo: The mind and the vital have always been dominant and developed themselves and are accustomed to act for themselves. How do you expect an influence coming forward and for the first time to be stronger? The psychic is not uneasy, it makes you uneasy when you do the wrong thing.
The uneasiness created by the psychic is not depression – it is in the nature of a rejection of the wrong movement. If the uneasiness causes depression or vital dissatisfaction, it is not the psychic. The uneasiness is simply a reminder to you to be more vigilant in future.
Nagin: In what way am I going so wrong that the psychic becomes too feeble to control my vital and its wrong movements?
Sri Aurobindo: You have been keeping the psychic in the background during a thousand lives and indulging the vital. That is why the psychic is not strong.
Nagin: Is not our psychic being in itself surrendered to the Divine?
Sri Aurobindo: It has to be surrendered consciously and with more knowledge. The psychic aspires to the Divine or answers to things divine, it is surrendered in principle, but it has to develop its surrender in detail carrying with it the surrender of all the being.
Nagin: Is it true that unless each of our parts – mind, vital and physical- aspires for transformation there cannot be a total surrender?
Sri Aurobindo:Yes.
Nagin: Does your answer mean that all our being must come under the psychic influence and obey it?
Sri Aurobindo:Yes [2].
Ours is a polyphonic personality in which different elements apportion the will-power and misuse it to pull the consciousness in every deviant direction. The mind shies from complex cognitive work, the higher vital wants the freedom to fulfill its ambitions, the lower vital loves to indulge in its petty deeds, and so on and so forth. As each of these defects is identified and relinquished, the psychic flame burns with ever-new intensity creating a palpable warmth in various parts of the being. That is the subject of the next discussion:
Nagin: Up to the last year the Mother’s Force had to continue its pressure on my lower nature to change. But now a mutual understanding seems strangely to emerge between the higher and the lower. Through my mental Purusha the higher consciousness points out to my lower being its obscurity and also shows the right movements in place of the habitual wrong ones. For example, while passing by a woman, the usual reaction was an automatic sex imagination and sensation in my subtle physical. But under the present cooperation the higher asks the lower, “What is the use of all such stupid sensations, you get nothing out of them. Instead, if you open yourself to the Mother you get her love and joy which is wholesome and lasting.”
Sri Aurobindo: That kind of direct mental enlightenment of the lower parts is very necessary at a certain stage [3]
Nagin: While I was writing to you about desires, something like a light touched a part of the vital which up to now has been indulging desires. It suddenly felt an irresistible need to give up its desires! My mind had said nothing to my vital regarding this, nor was there any pressure or force on it. It was a spontaneous feeling coming from the light above, that the desires had better be given up. Later I found that such a feeling is far more effective and decisive than human will-power.
Sri Aurobindo: Yes, because it is the light from the psychic[4].
As Nagin discovered, this fluidity of self-control is undeniably the hallmark of the psychic being. The mental willpower can only temporarily hold back our depraved tendencies but the psychic transformation cleanses them once and for all.
Discerning the spiritual power behind words
A book of spiritual wisdom is in reality a concentration of forces (i.e. a battery), as discussed in an earlier article. Another sign of the “psychic coming to the front” is that one gains automatic discernment into the spiritual power which exists in someone’s writing, as Nagin found out once:
Nagin: When I wrote that while reading your answers I experienced something coming out of my heart, you replied, “It depends on the nature of the movement. Something from the psychic?” Well, it was something from the psychic. But how did it get connected with the answers?
Sri Aurobindo: The psychic can be connected with anything that gives room for love or bhakti.
Nagin: But more than love or Bhakti, I experienced a sort of psychic oneness with your answers. Will you please explain this?
Sri Aurobindo: You have explained it yourself – it is the psychic contact with what is in or behind the answers – what comes out into them from myself [5].
As Nagin explains above, what he felt in Sri Aurobindo’s writing wasn’t devotion but a psychic oneness. Followers of Sri Aurobindo sometimes get criticized for taking an uncritical view of his writings. They are uncritical not because they are credulous but because their psychic being feels connected to his consciousness and gets uplifted by the the power behind his words.
The anguish born out of the psychic touch
Those who walk on the spiritual path are often beset by a persistent anguish characterized by a feeling of being abandoned in the no-mans land between two verdant pastures. On one side, the delights of the phenomenal world beckon sporadically but no longer seem attractive, while on the other side, one intermittenly feels a psychic happiness but the link to the Divine Shakti remains insecure. It requires a durable and persistent faith to stand firm in this transitional period. In this passage, the Mother astutely identifies the source of this anguish:
Somebody asks what is the true intensity for wanting the Divine, in the will to unite with the Divine. And then this person says that he has found within himself two different modes of aspiration, especially in the intensity of aspiration for the Divine: in one of these movements there is a sort of anguish, like a poignant pain, in the other, there is an anxiety, but at the same time a great joy.
This observation is quite correct.
And the question is this: “When do we feel this intensity mixed with anguish, and when the intensity containing joy?”
I don’t know if several or many of you have a similar experience, but it is very real, this experience, very spontaneous. And the answer is very simple.
As soon as the presence of the psychic consciousness is united with the aspiration, the intensity takes on quite a different character, as if it were filled with the very essence of an inexpressible joy. This joy is something that seems contained in everything else. Whatever may be the outer form of the aspiration, whatever difficulties and obstacles it may meet, this joy is there as though it filled up everything, and it carries you in spite of everything. That is the sure sign of the psychic presence. That is to say, you have established a contact with your psychic consciousness, a more or less complete, more or less constant contact, but at that moment it is the psychic being, the psychic consciousness which fills your aspiration, gives it its true contents. And that’s what is translated into joy.
When that is not there, the aspiration may come from different parts of the being; it may come mainly from the mind or mainly from the vital or even from the physical, or it may come from all the three together—it may come from all kinds of combinations. But in general, for the intensity to be there, the vital must be present. It is the vital which gives the intensity; and as the vital is at the same time the seat of most of the difficulties, obstacles, contradictions, it is the friction between the intensity of the aspiration and the intensity of the difficulty which creates this anguish.
This is no reason to stop one’s aspiration.
You must know, you must understand the reason for this anguish. And then, if you can introduce just one more element in your aspiration, that is, your trust in the divine Grace, trust in the divine Response, it counterbalances all possible anguish and you can aspire without any disturbance or fear [6].
As a star, uncompanioned, moves in heaven
Unastonished by the immensities of Space,
Travelling infinity by its own light,
The great are strongest when they stand alone.
A God-given might of being is their force,
A ray from self’s solitude of light the guide;
The soul that can live alone with itself meets God;
Its lonely universe is their rendezvous.
(Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, Book VI, Canto II)
Misusing the puissance of the psychic experience
The fugitive glimpses of the psychic being are so exhilarating that, without proper vigilance, they can be imperceptibly appropriated and misused by the external personality. After such an experience, you might become woolly-headed and resume indulgence in some past subconscious defect that had been lying dormant all along. One has to guard against such dangers as Sri Aurobindo points out here:
Nagin: Now a rapid flow of love and joy springs out from my heart centre. Is there any possibility of the lower vital misusing this flow?
Sri Aurobindo: It can be misused on a large scale only if there is a strong and vehement vital ego not accustomed to correction or else a vital full of the kamavasana (sexual desire). On a small scale it can be misused by the small selfishnesses, vanities, ambitions, demands of the lower vital supporting themselves upon it. If you are on guard against these things, then there is no danger of misuse. If the psychic puts forth psychic discernment along with the love, then there is no danger, for the light of psychic discernment at once exposes all mixture or misuse [7].
Confusing lesser experiences with the psychic experience
On a final note, it is important to understand that there are subordinate spiritual experiences that can easily be mistaken for the complete psychic transformation. It take years of patient effort to fully attain the psychic transformation, as the Mother explains:
For very often, when one touches certain parts of the mind which are under the psychic influence and full of light and the joy of that light, or when one touches certain very pure and very high parts of the emotive being which has the most generous, most unselfish emotions, one also has the impression of being in contact with one’s soul. But this is not the true soul, it is not the soul in its very essence. These are parts of the being under its influence and manifesting something of it. So, very often people enter into contact with these parts and this gives them illuminations, great joy, revelations, and they feel they have found their soul. But it is only the part of the being under its influence, one part or another, for… Exactly what happens is that one touches these things, has experiences, and then it gets veiled, and one wonders, “How is it that I touched my soul and now have fallen back into this state of ignorance and inconscience!” But that’s because one had not touched one’s soul, one had touched those parts of the being which are under the influence of the soul and manifest something of it, but are not it [8].
So thin a veil divides
Us from such joy, past words,
Walking in daily life—the business of the hour, each detail seen to;
Yet carried, rapt away, on what sweet floods of other Being:
Swift streams of music flowing, light far back through all Creation shining,
Loved faces looking—
Ah! from the true, the mortal self
So thin a veil divides!
(Edward Carpenter, So thin a veil)
Further reading
In a previously-posted article “How to awaken the psychic being”, Kireet Joshi, a direct disciple of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother offers invaluable tips.
A few conspicuous indicators of the advancing psychic transformation are discussed on the page dedicated to the psychic transformation.
References
- Mother. Collected Works of the Mother, vol. 6, p 76.
- Nagin Doshi. Guidance from Sri Aurobindo, Pondicherry: SABDA, 1987, vol. 1, pp 73-75.
- Nagin Doshi. Guidance from Sri Aurobindo, Pondicherry: SABDA, 1987, vol. 2, p 215.
- Nagin Doshi. Guidance from Sri Aurobindo, Pondicherry: SABDA, 1987, vol. 3, p 48-50.
- Ibid.
- Mother. Collected Works of the Mother, vol. 8, pp 250-251.
- Nagin Doshi. Guidance from Sri Aurobindo, Pondicherry: SABDA, 1987, vol. 3, p 48-50.
- Mother. Collected Works of the Mother, vol. 7, p 263.
Related Posts
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- The Nachiketa fire sacrifice
- How to distinguish between right and wrong?
- Spirituality : between morality and immorality
- Subtle forms of the ego – (transcending suffocation)
- Jnana Yoga : the ego blocks that have to be dissolved
- The rhythms of our consciousness
- On being truthful in speech
- Identifying the signs of spiritual progress
- Self-control over speech
- The spiritual ego which can develop
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Integral Yoga of Sri Aurobindo & The Mother 
Reblogged this on Skylight.
l know now why l ask for ‘Psychic Discrimination’ so much 🙂
We also need the ‘Transformation of Consciousness’ [which l assume is the same as the Psychic Transformation] or ‘Reversal in Consciousness’ described by Mother below – the Realisation that enables us to begin the Spiritual Life Proper:
“We want an integral transformation, the transformation of the body and all its activities.
But there is an absolutely indispensable first step that must be accomplished before anything else can be undertaken: the transformation of the consciousness.
The starting-point is of course the aspiration for this transformation and the will to realise it; without that nothing can be done. But if in addition to the aspiration there is an inner opening, a kind of receptivity, then one can enter into this transformed consciousness at a single stroke and maintain oneself there. This change of consciousness is abrupt, so to say; when it occurs, it occurs all of a sudden, although the preparation for it may have been long and slow. I am not speaking here of a mere change in mental outlook, but of a change in the consciousness itself. It is a complete and absolute change, a revolution in the basic poise; the movement is like turning a ball inside out.
To the transformed consciousness everything appears not only new and different, but almost the reverse of what it seemed to the ordinary consciousness. In the ordinary consciousness you advance slowly, by successive experiences, from ignorance to a very distant and often doubtful knowledge. In the transformed consciousness your starting-point is knowledge and you proceed from knowledge to knowledge.
However, this is only a beginning; for the outer consciousness, the various planes and parts of the outer active being are transformed only slowly and gradually as a result of the inner transformation.
There is a partial change of consciousness which makes you lose all interest in things that you once found desirable; but it is only a change of consciousness and not what we call the transformation.
For the transformation is fundamental and absolute; it is not merely a change, but a reversal of consciousness: the being turns inside out, as it were, and takes a completely different position. In this reversed consciousness the being stands above life and things and deals with them from there; it is at the centre of everything and directs its action outwards from there.
Whereas in the ordinary consciousness the being stands outside and below: from outside it strives to reach the centre; from below, crushed by the weight of its own ignorance and blindness, it struggles desperately to rise above them. The ordinary consciousness is ignorant of what things are in reality; it sees only their shell. But the true consciousness is at the centre, at the heart of reality and has the direct vision of the origin of all movements. Seated within and above, it knows the source, the cause and effect of all things and forces.
I repeat, this reversal is sudden. Something opens within you and all at once you find yourself in a new world.
The change may not be final and definitive to begin with; it sometimes requires time to settle permanently and become your normal nature. But once the change has taken place, it is there, in principle, once and for all; and then what is needed is to express it gradually in the details of practical life.
The first manifestation of the transformed consciousness always seems to be abrupt. You do not feel that you are changing slowly and gradually from one state into another; you feel that you are suddenly awakened or newly born. No effort of the mind can lead you to this state, for with the mind you cannot imagine what it is and no mental description can be adequate.
Such is the starting-point of all integral transformation.
The Mother
in “Bulletin”, August 1950
and in CWM, volume 12 “Education”, pages 80-81
published by Sri Aurobindo Ashram – Pondicherry
diffusion by SABDA “
Dear Mike,
I feel the transformed consciousness to which Mother refers is the same or similar to what Sri Aurobindo describes in “The Synthesis of Yoga,” in the third paragraph of its unfinished 13th chapter “The Supermind and the Yoga of Works”: “One must first acquire an inner Yogic consciousness and replace it by our ordinary view of things; one must revolutionise the whole present build of our being. Next, we have to go still deeper, discover our veiled psychic entity and in its light and under its government psychicise our inner and outer parts, turn mind-nature, life-nature, body-nature and all our mental, vital, physical action and states and movements into a conscious instrumentation of the soul.” Acquiring the Yogic consciousness would precede the psychicization (notice how he seems to distinguish the two stages or realizations) and probably is needed for the psychic transformation to proceed. The context in the chapter is that he is warning us that “the supramental change” is a far-off, distant acquisition, and that attaining a Yogic consciousness and then proceeding through the psychic and spiritual transformations (he goes on to describe the spiritual transformation later in the passage) is prerequisite to any supramental change or transformation. It does seem that this inner Yogic consciousness, this revolution of the being, while not the same as any stage of the triple transformation, is the realization most necessary.
This material that Sandeep has written and put together on the psychic being is first-rate!
Rick Lipschutz
Reversal of consciousness is the last stage of the psychic transformation. It occurs when the psychic being has completely subdued the rebellious external being (mind, vital, physical). In other words, it is a total “psychisation” of the external being. It is aptly called a “reversal” because it is the polar opposite of the conventional situation where the external being is suppressing the psychic impulses.
In the Agenda Aug 5 1961, the Mother says reversal is “the result of union with the psychic being.”
Terminology seems to be a little fluid because in the Agenda November 15, 1958, she says one goes through many reversals – probably as a result of many successive ascents. The text is as follows:
A.S. Dalal has an article on Reversal over at the IPI site
http://www.ipi.org.in/texts/ip2/ip2-1.1-.php
re: “Reversal of consciousness is the last stage of the psychic transformation.”
q: is the subconscient purged at this point as well?
Also, the centers (chakras)? Are they all open at this point? SA: “All the inner centers must have burst open and released into action their capacities;….” The Life Divine, p. 929-31
I found this on “The Psychic Transformation” blog regarding the purging of the subconscient:
Sri Aurobindo alludes to this loss of memory briefly in The Life Divine:
…And there is possible too a state of consciousness in which, although there is no gap of memory, yet by a rapid development the whole being feels itself changed in every mental circumstance and the man feels born into a new personality, so that, if it were not for the co-ordinating mind, he would not at all accept his past as belonging to the person he now is, although he remembers perfectly well that it was in the same form of body and same field of mind-substance that it occurred.
(The Life Divine, Memory, Ego and Self-Experience, p 539)
***This was a little confusing since there was/is no memory loss that (I could only presume) would indicate the subconscient being purged. Also, I did not notice this quote before! 🙂
And I found nothing yet about how the chakras are to have “burst open” as SA suggests. Since these are subtle experiences it is hard to pinpoint a difference between burst-open or closed.
****It’s like all the pieces of a massive puzzle suddenly falling into place, but still looking for a few pieces. 🙂
Just because certain textual descriptions match your changing phenomenal experience of the world, that may not imply that you have undergone a major yogic transformation.
The Chakras have to open, there has to be heat and pain in the body during this process and that results in an awakening of yogic powers. That’s what the core yoga texts say. The purging of the subconscious is also mentioned in Patanjali where he says “klesha karma nivritti” (4.30).
Agreed Sandeep, it is hard to know what is what.
“The first manifestation of the transformed consciousness always seems to be abrupt. You do not feel that you are changing slowly and gradually from one state into another; you feel that you are suddenly awakened or newly born.”
l believe l’ve read about this in things like Zen Budhism and other similar paths, which they usually call ‘Sudden Enlightenment’. Although. lf l’m right, they wouldn’t associate it with the ‘SOUL’ as such, because Budhism doesn’t recognise a ‘soul’ or ‘God’ to my knowledge [not sure if this applies to every sect of budhism, though]. Still, it sounds very much like the same experience – usually a dazzling Light or illumination which changes their world-view completely.
“Acquiring the Yogic consciousness would precede the psychicization (notice how he seems to distinguish the two stages or realizations) and probably is needed for the psychic transformation to proceed”
Yes Rick, lt does seem that there IS a necessary condition or realisation required before the Psychic can be realised. l hadn’t really come across this before.
“One must first acquire an inner Yogic consciousness”
l think the quote below clarifies what this inner Yogic consciousness is – at least to me:
The following is from SABCL, Vol. 26, “Sri Aurobindo on Himself”, pp. 95-97
“The first process of Yoga is therefore to open the ranges of this inner being and to live from there outward, governing his outward life by an inner light and force. In doing so he discovers in himself his true soul which is not this outer mixture of mental, vital and physical elements but something of the Reality behind them, a spark from the one Divine Fire.”
re: comments by Rick, Sandeep and Mike: I find all these comments and quotes exceptional. I find that in practice, no matter how much I have previously read on the topic of Psychic Transformation, how little my mind (in that state of mind) could I possibly prepare for the actual event itself – thus I suppose the term “elusive” has been well used. Before the actual transformation, there is a longer period of hit and miss…uncertainty, confusion/disorientation, etcetera. Needless to say, it is a painful process on multiple levels. …it is during this time when I wanted/needed contact, either with others at the same level of process or with someone who has been through it, to assist in whatever way possible and hopefully assist and confirm the authenticity of the said process as well as the progression of the same. In some degree (I would say a very large degree) that need had been met here regardless if this site is intended as a means of support or not. Thank You!
thanks Sandeep.
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This makes it clearer what ‘psychic in front’ means.
“Sweet Mother, is identification with the psychic the same
thing as the psychic coming in front?
That is, the first step is the identification, and then, once you can
keep this identification, the psychic governs the rest of the nature
and life. It becomes the master of existence. So this is what we
mean by the psychic coming in front. It is that which governs,
directs, even organises the life, organises the consciousness, the
different parts of the being. When this happens, the work goes
very fast. Very fast, well… relatively very fast.”
l’ve always felt that the true psychic contact must be a ‘dazzling’ experience as M describes below. Some ppl have described their contact in other ways, but l feel they are only getting far-off glimpses or touches and not the True Psychic Contact which IMO has to be like M had in Paris – l could be wrong, though. How can we be sure otherwise??
“But even if you enter consciously into the psychic, it is dazzling;
and it is within your reach because it is your own psychic being,
and yet it is so different from your external consciousness that
the first time you enter it consciously, it seems to you truly dazzling,
something infinitely more brilliant than the most brilliant
sunlight.”
“To sit in meditation before a closed door, as though it were
a heavy door of bronze—and one sits in front of it with the
will that it may open—and to pass to the other side; and so
the whole concentration, the whole aspiration is gathered into a
beam and pushes, pushes, pushes against this door, and pushes
more and more with an increasing energy until all of a sudden
it bursts open and one enters. It makes a very powerful impression.
And so one is as though plunged into the light and then
one has the full enjoyment of a sudden and radical change of
consciousness, with an illumination that captures one entirely,
and the feeling that one is becoming another person. And this is
a very concrete and very powerful way of entering into contact
with one’s psychic being.”
“Sweet Mother, here Sri Aurobindo says: “The nexus between
the psychic being and the higher consciousness is
the principal means of the siddhi.” Ordinarily is there
not a nexus between the psychic being and the higher
consciousness?
Ordinarily means in the ordinary life? A relation between the
psychic being…
Yes.
It is almost, almost totally unconscious.
In the ordinary life there’s not one person in a million who
has a conscious contact with his psychic being, even momentarily.
The psychic being may work from within, but so invisibly
and unconsciously for the outer being that it is as though it did
not exist. And in most cases, the immense majority, almost the
totality of cases, it’s as though it were asleep, not at all active,
in a kind of torpor.
It is only with the sadhana and a very persistent effort that
one succeeds in having a conscious contact with his psychic
being. Naturally, it is possible that there are exceptional cases—
but this is truly exceptional, and they are so few that they could
be counted—where the psychic being is an entirely formed,
liberated being, master of itself, which has chosen to return to
earth in a human body in order to do its work. And in this
case, even if the person doesn’t do the sadhana consciously, it is
possible that the psychic being is powerful enough to establish
a more or less conscious relation. But these cases are, so to say,
unique and are exceptions which confirm the rule.
In almost, almost all cases, a very, very sustained effort is
needed to become aware of one’s psychic being. Usually it is
considered that if one can do it in thirty years one is very lucky
—thirty years of sustained effort, I say. It may happen that it’s
quicker. But this is so rare that immediately one says, “This is
not an ordinary human being.” That’s the case of people who
have been considered more or less divine beings and who were
great yogis, great initiates.”
“What then is the element in us that is not our social environment, not our family, not our traditions or marriage or job, that is not in the play of universal Nature of of circumstances in us, but nevertheless gives us a sense of I, even when everything else has collapsed? As a matter of fact, it is really I when everything else collapsed. because that is the hour of our truth.” Satprem, The Adventure of Consciousness, pg.90
A movie I had seen that may parallel this experience is titled “Children of Men” (2006). BTW this movie is not based upon the Yoga — as far as I know.
Sorry about the typos….
Q&A 1930 – 1931 CWM Vol 3 pg 123, 125:
“To dwell in the psychic is to be lifted above all greed. You will have no hankering, no worry, no feverish desire. … Then you will be one, nothing will shake or disturb you, you will make a steady and lasting progress and be above such petty things as greed for food.”
This conversion will be like a light switch being turned to the “On” position. It will be rather abrupt, or sudden. When it comes there will be a marked stability of the psychic experience — it will be obvious beyond all doubt that a new state of being, of experience, has been reached and will not be lost, or cannot be lost, it will remain permanently fixed — unwavering. When the psychic is forward, only then can a steady sense of peace and calm be maintained. Before this there is a struggle to maintain a steady experience, and after, there is no more ‘personal’ effort needed. It is the psychic which has moved to the center and holds that space, that integrity.
“It is only when the life turns towards the Divine that the soul can truly come forward.”
Sri Aurobindo
ref. Gems from Sri Aurobindo, First series, p.109
“Gradually the horizon become distinct, the path grows clear, and we move towards a greater and greater certitude.” The Mother
ref. Prayers and Meditations
Easy question:
I have two quotations which appear to conflict each other,
MP Pandit says “When we say inner being you can take it that we mean the psychic being.”
SA says “There is an inner being and an inmost being which we call the psychic.”
They may not be speaking about the same thing, yes???
Thank You!
In case my question is unclear, it sounds like SA is saying there is both an ‘inner being’ and an ‘inmost being’, and Pandit is stating the ‘two’ are ‘one.’ It is possible that I am misreading SA’s statement.
You can term most of occult experience as psychic, what MP Pandit said was approximation and generalization.
People engaged in spiritual practices often use same terms for different things and vise verse, even within one teaching there could be discrepancy, because assigned meaning is based on individual experience, understanding, means and aims of expression.
Thank you, Amsha.
Funny how I just found this by SA (from Letters on the Yoga Vol II) “The inner being means the psychic, the inner mind, the inner vital, the inner physical.” And “The inner being is composed of the inner mental, the inner physical. The psychic is the inmost supporting all the others.”
In effect SA and Pandit are saying the same thing.
The Mother also equates the ‘lnner Being’ with the Psychic as well in Questions and Answers ’29-31 page
Sorry the above got posted somehow.
On Questions and Answers 29-31 page 148
“This psychic consciousness is the inner being of a man, the material from which his true soul or jiva can be fashioned when, in response to its aspiration, the Supramental descends to give it a consistent personality. The exterior being of man is a perishable formation out of the stuff of universal Nature — mental, vital, physical — and is due to the complex interplay of all kinds of forces.”.
Thank you, Mike. This topic has been of significant interest of late — been closely tracking the interior processes.
“All we become and do and bear in the physical life is prepared behind the veil within us. It is therefore of immense importance for a yoga which aims at the transformation of life to grow conscious of what goes on within these domains, to be master there and be able to feel, know and deal with the secret forces that determine our internal and external growth or decline.” SA, Letters on the Yoga Vol II, p. 993-4