The Double Soul in Man

                                                                                              June 14, 2000

   The universal movement desires to give birth to individuality. This results in a seed. But this seed is obscure and unformed. It is not light or knowledge, but a will. This will is not free, but is possessed by the universal movement. This will is in the material or atomic existence. It is a force of some involved will. It is a dumb inconscient drive or urge. This is the first status of life and that will is its characteristic. The root of the second status is desire. It is eager to possess but is limited in capacity. The bud of the third is Love. Love seeks both to possess and be possessed, to receive and to give itself. What then is the fourth stage? The supramental existence is founded on the divine unity of souls. The original will which is obscure and unformed must become pure and emerge fully. The desire of limited capacity must be fulfilled and illumined. Love that seeks to possess and be possessed must have the high and deep satisfaction of the conscious interchange of Love. This would be the fine flower of the fourth stage and its sign of perfection. The individual seeks for delight. And the universal too seeks the delight of things. In the above we see the shapes of their seeking and their stages of seeking. The Delight in things is a dumb conception in Matter. There it has to express through opposites and has to pass through the vicissitudes. Here it becomes its luminous consummation in Spirit. The ascent of life is truly the ascent of the divine Delight in things.

    The world being what it is, it could not be otherwise. The world is a masked form of Satchidananda. It is the nature of consciousness of Satchidananda. And therefore the world is a place in which His force must always find the divine Bliss. It must achieve an omnipresent self-delight. Life is an energy of His conscious-force. Therefore the secret of all its movements must be a hidden delight. This delight must be inherent in all things. This delight is the cause, motive and object of all its activities. By reason of egoistic division, that delight is missed. It is held back behind a veil. It is represented as its own opposite. We know being is masked in death; consciousness figures as inconscient. Force we see as ridiculous in capacity. This state of affairs cannot satisfy living things. Nor can they rest from movement. They can fulfill the movement only by laying hold of universal delight. This delight is at once the secret total delight of its own being. It is also the delight of the original Satchidananda. Satchidananda is transcendent and immanent. It is all-encompassing, all-informing, all-upholding. To seek for delight is the fundamental impulse and sense of life. To find and possess it and fulfill it is its whole motive.

   But where in us is this principle of Delight? Through what term of our being does it manifest and fulfill itself in the action of the cosmos? We know the principle of Conscious-Force manifests as Life. It uses Life for its cosmic term. The principle of Supermind manifests and uses mind. There is a fourfold principle of divine Being in creating the universe. These are Existence, Conscious-Force, Bliss and Supermind. Supermind is omnipresent in the material cosmos, but veiled. It is operative secretly behind the actual events. It occultly expresses itself there. The Supermind uses mind, its own subordinate term for effectuation. Similarly, the divine conscious-force is omnipresent in the material cosmos, but veiled. It is operative secretly behind the actual phenomenon of things. It too expresses itself through its subordinate term, Life. We have not yet examined the principle of Matter separately. But it is evident that here too we find a similar phenomenon. The divine All-existence is also omnipresent in the material cosmos, but veiled. It is hidden behind All-existence is also omnipresent in the material cosmos, but veiled. It manifests itself there initially through its own subordinate term. Substance, the form of being is the subordinate term here, Matter. If so, the principle of divine Bliss also must be omnipresent in the cosmos. It too will be veiled. It would possess itself behind the actual phenomenon of things. It will be manifest through some subordinate principle of its own. Let us find it from its hidden recess. Thus it would be acting in the universe.

   Such a term is there in us. Sometimes we call it a soul in a special sense. It is the psychic principle which is not mind or life. Surely it is not the body. But it holds in itself the opening and flowering of the essence of all these. they open to their peculiar delight of self, of light, to love and to joy. It seeks beauty and a refined purity of being. Every cosmic principle in us has a double status. So also, this too has a double soul or psychic term. We have two minds. One is the surface mind. It expresses our evolutionary ego. It is the superficial mentality. It is created in us by our emergence out of Matter. Another is the subliminal mind. It is not hampered by our surface mind and its limitation. It is something large, powerful, and luminous. It is the true mental being behind our mental personality. We mistake that personality for ourselves. We have two lives. One is outer, involved in our body. It is bound by its past evolution of Matter. this physical body which lives now, was born and will die. The other is the subliminal force of life. It is not cabined between the narrow boundaries of physical birth and physical death. It is our true vital being. It is behind the form of living. We ignorantly take it for our real existence. Even in the matter of our being, there is this duality. Behind our body we have subtler material substance. It is an existence which provides us the substance. It is a substance not only of the physical form. But we erroneously imagine it to be the whole body of our spirit. So too, we have a double psychic entity in us. One is the surface desire-soul. It works in our vital cravings, our emotions, our aesthetic faculty. It seeks mental power, a pure power of light, knowledge and happiness. Also there is a subliminal psychic entity. It is a pure power of light, love and joy. It seeks the refined essence of being. It is our true soul behind the outer form of psychic existence. We often call that by that name. Sometimes this large, pure psychic entity comes to the surface. Then we say of a man that he has a soul. Often it is absent in his outward psychic life. We then say he has no soul.

   Our life consists of the external forms of being and the subliminal formation of our larger, truer individuality. The externals are the small egoistic formations. Our concealed part of being contains our individuality. It is close to our universality. It touches the universality. Also it is in constant relation and commerce with it. The cosmic Mind has the universal knowledge. The subliminal mind in us is open to that knowledge. The subliminal life in us is open to the universal force-formation of cosmic Matter. There are thick walls that separate the subliminal from the surface. They are there between mind, life and body. Nature has the trouble of piercing through those walls. It can pierce only imperfectly. Its skills is very great, but the walls re so thick that even its great skill ends up being clumsy in its effort. Sri Aurobindo calls it skilful-clumsy device. It is a rarefied medium of communication and separation. Both functions are done simultaneously. The cosmic soul takes delight in its own existence. It delights even in the existence of all the other souls. These many souls represent the cosmic soul. The subliminal soul in us is open to the universal delight. Nature lend herself to the play and development of mind, life and matter. Souls here, as everywhere, represent the parts of the being. The surface soul is shut off from the cosmic delight by egoistic walls. They are thick walls there are gates in the walls allowing penetration. These walls do permit great penetration. Also, they have a character of dwarfing the great cosmic Delight when it approaches through them. The Delight is distorted, masked and turned into its opposite.

   So, there is no true life on the surface. True life is soul-life. What we have is a psychic deformation of the truth of things. The touch of things is wrongly received as their opposites. Man cannot find his real soul. It is his malady, or misfortune. He lives in his real soul inwardly. Outwardly, his embrace of the world escapes the touch of the reality of his soul. That is the root-cause of his misfortune. He seeks the essence of reality, but meets with surface touches and impressions. They are contradictory in nature. the essence of being, the essence of power, the essence of consciousness, the essence of delight are what man is after. There is one universal being, power, conscious existence and delight. To find that, man needs to find that essence. these millions of touches and impressions can have a unity and harmony of the Truth. All these contradictions would be reconciled in that unity. the self of the world and his own self through his true soul. This is possible when the unity and harmony of the truth are reached. His egoistic ignorance of mind, thought, emotions, and senses stands in the way. They do not respond to the embrace of the world whole-heartedly or courageously. They are cautious, they shrink from the touch. Either they eagerly rush or are sullen and discontented. Their response is panic or anger. They recoil from a displeasing touch, or a comforted at a pleasing embrace. Comfort or alarm, satisfaction or dissatisfaction are their responses. We know of pleasure, pain and indifference. These are the triple misinterpretation of the desire soul. Wrong reception of life interprets the rasa, the delight in things wrongly. Pure essential joy of being is so rendered by the egoistic life.

   Earlier we have considered the Delight of Existence in its relation to the world. We found we have standards of pleasure and pain and indifference. Those standards, we saw were not valid. We could find no absoluteness in the standards. The standards were found to be subjective. It was the; subjectivity of the receiving consciousness. That alone determines. We also saw the intensity of these sensations can be varied at will. they can be heightened or depressed or effaced. The great secret about pain and pleasure is that in their secret reality, both are the same. They can also be interchanged. It is our sensations that give a vibration the hue of pain or pleasure. Our emotions too do it. Indifference is the inattention of the surface desire-soul. The surface is of mind, emotions or sensations and cravings. They crave for the rasa of things. It can be because of the incapacity to receive or respond to it. Or it may refuse to respond. It may drive down the pleasure by the will into neutrality. The response becomes neutral as the surface refuses acceptance. Something does happen in all these things. It is positive refusal sometimes. Or it may be negative unreadiness or incapacity. What is not yet subliminally active, the surface is incapable or responding to.

   By now we have psychological observations. There are some experiments too. They confirm the truth of the subliminal. The surface receives some touches and ignores others. Whereas the subliminal receives all these touches without exception. this is the truth of subliminal. The subliminal has a soul. It responds to the rasa. Rasa is the essence in experience of all these touches. The surface desire-soul rejects many of distaste. it rejects, refuses or ignores. It can neutrally accept which is ignoring. Unless we go behind the surface life, self-knowledge is not possible. Surface life is selective life. It is merely an outer experience. Surface is an imperfect sounding board. It is a hasty, incompetent, fragmentary translation of a little. In fact, we are not little, we are much, rather very much. We have to go behind this.