The self and the structure of the personality
An overview of Sri Aurobindo's terminology
author: Matthijs Cornelissen
last revision: February 28, 2016

1.   the starting point: a roughly constituted chaos

If one 's aim in yoga is liberation, one does not need a comprehensive understanding of human nature: one can focus one's efforts on only those aspects of psychology which one really needs for the particular path one has chosen. For the integral transformation Sri Aurobindo envisages, on the other hand, one does need an integral, deep and detailed understanding of human nature in all its astounding complexity. And complex, human nature definitely is. In fact, in the beginning of The Synthesis of Yoga, Sri Aurobindo describes human nature in its normal state as a "roughly constituted chaos":

The practice of Yoga brings us face to face with the extraordinary complexity of our own being, the stimulating but also embarrassing multiplicity of our personality, the rich endless confusion of Nature.

Sri Aurobindo proceeds after this with a rather abysmal depiction of what human nature ordinarily amounts to. He writes —

To the ordinary man who lives upon his own waking surface, ignorant of the self's depths and vastnesses behind the veil, his psychological existence is fairly simple. A small but clamourous company of desires, some imperative intellectual and aesthetic cravings, some tastes, a few ruling or prominent ideas amid a great current of unconnected or ill-connected and mostly trivial thoughts, a number of more or less imperative vital needs, alternations of physical health and disease, a scattered and inconsequent succession of joys and griefs, frequent minor disturbances and vicissitudes and rarer strong searchings and upheavals of mind or body, and through it all Nature, partly with the aid of his thought and will, partly without or in spite of it, arranging these things in some rough practical fashion, some tolerable disorderly order, — this is the material of his existence.

Not a particularly flattering picture, but it is one in which one can easily recognise oneself. Sri Aurobindo stresses subsequently that the different parts of our nature have all their own character and that they are not always in harmony with each other —

The most disconcerting discovery is to find that every part of us — intellect, will, sense-mind, nervous or desire self, the heart, the body — has each, as it were, its own complex individuality and natural formation independent of the rest; it neither agrees with itself nor with the others nor with the representative ego which is the shadow cast by some central and centralising self on our superficial ignorance. We find that we are composed not of one but many personalities and each has its own demands and differing nature. Our being is a roughly constituted chaos into which we have to introduce the principle of a divine order.

— Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis of Yoga, pp. 74-75

The complexity of human nature becomes perhaps most painfully clear when one tries to change it. And yet, there is a system to all the madness that happens inside us, and over the years Sri Aurobindo developed a model of the personality that is relatively simple and eminently practical. In this section we'll have a look at the terms he most commonly uses to describe this basic model.

Sri Aurobindo was well aware that all classifications and maps are to some extent arbitrary and he did use slightly different mappings at different periods and for different purposes. He writes:

"...a classification can always be valid from the principle and viewpoint adopted by it while from other principles and viewpoints another classification of the same things can be equally valid."

— Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine, p. 785

And yet, maps do have their role to play and as long as one doesn't take them for the territory, they can be extremely helpful on one's journey. So here we go.

The model we will describe here is the one Sri Aurobindo developed when he tried to help the disciples who had gathered around him, with their sādhanā or yogic practice. It is largely from The Life Divine, The Synthesis of Yoga and his Letters on Yoga.

The main terms Sri Aurobindo uses in these writings to describe "the planes and parts of the being" can be grouped into three different sets:

• Terms that belong to a concentric system: outer nature, inner nature, and innermost or true nature.
• Terms that belong to a vertical system based on the Vedic "sevenfold chord of being": matter, life, mind, supermind, ānanda, cit-tapas, sat.
• Terms related to our centre of identification: ego, soul and self.

These three sets are like perspectives that look at the same psychological reality from three different directions. Each perspective has its own beauty, meaning and usefulness but, as we will see at the end, when we bring them together, something more is added. The whole structure finds its meaning and functionality then within the holding framework of Sri Aurobindo's concept of an ongoing evolution of consciousness, and we become aware of a certain inevitability of movement, something that says, "Yes, this is where we came from, this is where we are struggling at present, and this must be the stunningly beautiful future towards which we are heading".

The following outline shows two other major contributions Sri Aurobindo made to our understanding of human nature: his idea of an evolving soul or "psychic being", and the way he differentiated the higher layers of the mind, both from each other and from the vijñānamayakośa.(1) Both may appear as rather metaphysical, or as belonging to the somewhat suspect territory of the "occult", but Sri Aurobindo has shown how these realms can be studied with rigour and precision, and they are very much worth getting into for Psychology, as they have rather far-reaching consequences for the meaning of our individual and collective existence. They can best be explained, however, after we have covered some more basic issues, so we will come back to them later. We'll now look first at the concentric system.

2.   the concentric system

The "concentric system" is the one we all use when we talk about our "surface nature", our "inner being", our "deepest Self", or about "going within". It is what whe encounter when we go as if inward from our surface nature to our innermost self. In the concentric system, Sri Aurobindo distinguishes in first instance three major realms: an outer nature, an inner nature, and an innermost or true nature with the psychic at its centre.

The term "outer nature" is used for that part of our nature of which we are conscious to some extent in our normal every day life. The longer we study ourselves, the clearer it becomes that this is only a very tiny part of our being as a whole. Freud speaks about the tip of an iceberg; Sri Aurobindo about a bubble on the ocean of our existence:

We are not only what we know of ourselves but an immense more which we do not know; our momentary personality is only a bubble on the ocean of our existence.

— Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine, p. 555

In this outer nature, physical, emotional, cognitive, and conative elements are all mixed-up together. When we get angry, our body and mind tend to be as much involved as our feelings. On the surface thoughts are rarely entirely free from emotional colouring. Bodily states like tiredness and fitness, illness and health effect the way we feel and think. Our mind can effect the way we feel both emotionally and physically. We'll discuss this further in the next section.

The situation gets more complicated because the outer nature is the end result of "an immense more" inside, of which we are not aware. It is rare that we know exactly from where our feelings, thoughts, and actions come.

The term "inner nature" is used for the part of ourselves which in our ordinary waking consciousness is not fully accessible to ourselves. The word "inner" might give the impression that we are dealing only with a small, dark and purely private territory. The opposite is true. Our inner nature is, according to the Indian tradition, vaster and more luminous than our outer nature; it has access to broader and higher ranges of experience and knowledge; and it is more, not less connected to others and the rest of the world. Though Sri Aurobindo sometimes used the word subconscious to describe this part of our nature, he preferred the term subliminal as the etymology of this word only indicates that it is a part of ourselves that is below the threshold of our ordinary outer awareness without implying that it is smaller or less conscious than our outer nature.

Most of us are not aware of what the subliminal contributes to our lives except indirectly, through unexplained feelings and changes of mood, through dreams and other special states, or through sudden thoughts and flashes of insight, which are thrown up from there onto the surface. All these contributions from the subliminal are possible because we are in the subliminal connected vertically to layers above and below our ordinary awareness, and horizontally to other people and to the myriad of forces and beings that surround us.

The part of the subliminal, which deals with our own deeper and higher being, Sri Aurobindo calls the intraconscient, and the part, which connects us to others and to the cosmic forces around us, he calls the circumconscient. It is through the intraconscient that we can become aware of those aspects of our own nature that we have no access to in our ordinary waking state. It includes the nether regions, which Freud called the "unconscious", as well as ranges above our ordinary waking consciousness of which Jung explored some aspects. It is through the circumconscient part of our inner being that Sri Aurobindo sees most parapsychological perceptions taking place.

Though peeks into the inner nature can be had through dreams, dreams are not really the "royal road" Freud held them to be. They are more like incidental cracks in the wall that separates the inner from the outer nature. To explore the inner nature systematically, one needs a trained, "expert" level of types of knowledge that in ordinary life are hardly developed and that in their basic principles and methods are quite different from those used by the rest of science.(2)

It may be good to realise that people who have not developed such deeper, yoga-based awareness of their inner states and processes will tend to call only their behaviour their "outer nature" (as it is visible on the outside) and the rest of themselves their "inner being". But most of what they think of as their "inner being", appears to Sri Aurobindo as their "outer nature", as he looks from a viewpoint that is located much deeper within.

The terms "innermost nature" and "true nature" describe the deepest layers of the subliminal, which Sri Aurobindo also calls the "central being" or "Self" with a capital "S". At the very centre of this central being, at the level of the heart, there is in each creature a psychic entity, a tiny spark of the Divine, without which, it could not exist. In the human being, this psychic spark or soul slowly grows through many lifetimes into a more extensive, qualitied, psychic being. We'll get back to it in our discussions of the various centres of identity, where we'll also take up the terms puruṣa and prakṛti.

A simplified diagram would then look something like this:

Figure 1. The concentric system

On the right we see the parts of our nature and on the left the types of knowledge that give access to them.

The outermost crust of our outer nature is all that we can legitimately call our "behaviour", as this is the only part of ourselves which is directly, objectively visible to others. Accordingly, this is also the only part of ourselves that mainstream, third-person psychology can study with any degree of precision and confidence. Present-day science can access the rest of our outer nature only indirectly by inference or through reliance on the self-reports of its subjects, who for their knowledge have to rely on the notoriously inaccurate method of introspection. The rest of our nature is entirely outside the purview of mainstream science, as it can only be known systematically though a yoga-based inner discipline.

3.   the vertical system

The "vertical system" is built around an ancient Vedic division in seven layers which Sri Aurobindo calls the sevenfold chord of being. From top down the layers are:

• Sat (existence)
• Cit-Tapas (consciousness-force)
• Ānanda (bliss)
• Supermind (vijñāna, mahas)
• Mind (manas)
• Life (prāṇa)
• Matter (annam)

There is a deep connection between psychology and cosmology in the Indian tradition and Sri Aurobindo's work is no exception. The individual and the cosmos are seen as two expressions of the same basic principles, and so it is not surprising that many of these terms apply with only minor modifications to:

• Levels and types of consciousness
• Independently existing planes or worlds
• Forces and beings in these worlds

The lowest three, Mind, Life and Matter, are part of the complex evolving manifestation and as such these terms also apply to:

• Parts and planes in our own personal nature
• Stages of collective and individual evolution

Of course Sri Aurobindo would not be Sri Aurobindo if he would take this system too seriously. In the chapter of The Life Divine specifically called "The Sevenfold Chord of Being", he is hardly on his way, when he adds an eighth element and folds his neat ladder up with the footnote: "The Vedic Seers speak of the seven rays, but also of eight, nine, ten or twelve." The more usual representation remains however, this simple ladder of seven steps, with an added horizontal dimension in which the psychic sits "behind the heart."

Although in our hugely complex evolutionary world they all overlap and intermingle, each of these seven powers or principles also forms a more or less independent "typal world", a plane of existence with a corresponding quality of consciousness. In our evolutionary world, the different planes influence and penetrate each other and there can be concrete formations from one plane in the other planes.

We'll now look at them in some more detail, this time from the bottom upwards.

The physical

Introducing the physical plane, Sri Aurobindo writes:

Each plane of our being — mental, vital, physical — has its own consciousness, separate though interconnected and interacting; but to our outer mind and sense, in our waking experience, they are all confused together. The body, for instance, has its own consciousness and acts from it, even without any mental will of our own or even against that will, and our surface mind knows very little about this body-consciousness, feels it only in an imperfect way, sees only its results and has the greatest difficulty in finding out their causes. It is part of the yoga to become aware of this separate consciousness of the body, to see and feel its movements and the forces that act upon it from inside or outside and to learn how to control and direct it even in its most hidden and (to us) subconscient processes. But the body-consciousness itself is only part of the individualized physical consciousness in us, which we gather and build out of the secretly conscious forces of universal physical nature.

There is the universal physical consciousness of nature and there is our own which is a part of it, moved by it, and used by the central being for the support of its expression in the physical world and for a direct dealing with all these external objects and movements and forces. This physical consciousness-plane receives from the other planes their powers and influences and makes formations of them in its own province. Therefore we have a physical mind as well as a vital mind and the mind proper; we have a vital-physical part in us—the nervous being—as well as the vital proper; and both are largely conditioned by the gross material bodily part which is almost entirely subconscient to our experience.

— Sri Aurobindo, Letters on Yoga, p. 347

The vital

Embodied life in the details of its physical operations has to follow the laws of physics and inorganic chemistry, but while it does that, it yet achieves something new that at least in some aspects seems to go against the basic spirit of the inorganic physical reality. Plants and animals manage to reconstitute their immensely complex structures out of the utterly simple molecules of air, water and soil in total disregard of the basic principles of inertia and entropy, physical nature's consistent tendency towards the dissipation of energy. As Sri Aurobindo notices, someone who knew only the purely physical world could never have predicted, or even imagined, the way life would develop on our planet.

In terms of the Indian tradition the origin of life on our planet is easier to understand. The life-force is a manifestation of the pranamaya kosha and as such has a fundamentally different character than the material world which belongs to the annamaya kosha. While the physical reality is dominated by tamas, and its concomitant properties of inertia and entropy, the vital is characterised by rajas, energy, play, enjoyment and self-assertion in ever more complex patterns of interchange. The way this is seen to operate in the process of evolution is that life — as a type of consciousness — first involves into the near inconscience of matter, and then begins to evolve from there, while remaining part of that material world. Life does this by transforming the stuff of matter till it begins to manifest a mixture of its own characteristics with those typical of life. The details of the process are worked out under the influence of formative energies descending directly from the preexisting life plane.

Philosophically the process may remind one of Plato's ideas, but it is all integrated in a far more organic and embodied manner. Sri Aurobindo has moreover worked out the subtleties of the integration of descending and ascending forces in far more detail. The end result could perhaps be seen as a form of realistic idealism (or idealistic realism) that bridges fashionable oversimplifications like the opposing views of evolutionism and intelligent design, or constructivism and essentialism.

For psychology the most important point is that the self-existent joy and energy that are typical for the life-force in its own domain, undergo a specific degradation when life begins to manifest within the physical world. This happens because of the way they are used there. In order to overcome the tamas of the physical reality, joy turns into need and desire, because only these can force physical organisms to wake up and behave like living creatures. At our stage of evolution this degradation becomes conscious and the source of much of our suffering. When the life-force enlists the half-individualised human mind, the basic energy and enthusiasm of life turn into egoistic self-assertion with all the pain and suffering this brings with it. It is part of yoga to recover the joy that is inherent in life in its original state.

About "the vital" as it appears within the human personality, Sri Aurobindo says the following:

The vital has to be carefully distinguished from mind, even though it has a mind element transfused into it; the vital is the Life-nature made up of desires, sensations, feelings, passions, energies of action, will of desire, reactions of the desire-soul in man and of all that play of possessive and other related instincts, anger, fear, greed, lust, etc., that belong to this field of the nature. Mind and vital are mixed up on the surface of the consciousness, but they are quite separate forces in themselves and as soon as one gets behind the ordinary surface consciousness one sees them as separate, discovers their distinction and can with the aid of this knowledge analyse their surface mixtures.

— Sri Aurobindo, Letters on Yoga, p. 321

The vital... is a thing of desires, impulses, force-pushes, emotions, sensations, seekings after life-fulfilment, possession and enjoyment; these are its functions and its nature; — it is that part of us which seeks after life and its movements for their own sake and it does not want to leave hold of them if they bring it suffering as well as or more than pleasure; it is even capable of luxuriating in tears and suffering as part of the drama of life. What then is there in common between the thinking intelligence and the vital and why should the latter obey the mind and not follow its own nature? The disobedience is perfectly normal instead of being, as Augustine suggests, unintelligible. Of course, man can establish a mental control over his vital and in so far as he does it he is a man, — because the thinking mind is a nobler and more enlightened entity and consciousness than the vital and ought, therefore, to rule and, if the mental will is strong, can rule. But this rule is precarious, incomplete and held only by much self-discipline. For if the mind is more enlightened, the vital is nearer to earth, more intense, vehement, more directly able to touch the body. There is too a vital mind which lives by imagination, thoughts of desire, will to act and enjoy from its own impulse and this is able to seize on the reason itself and make it its auxiliary and its justifying counsel and supplier of pleas and excuses. There is also the sheer force of Desire in man which is the vital's principal support and strong enough to sweep off the reason, as the Gita says, "like a boat on stormy waters", nāvamivāmbhasi.

— Sri Aurobindo, Letters on Yoga, p. 329

The vital plane is often divided into three sub-planes:

• the lower vital, which consists of our basic life instincts, fear, anger, small enjoyments etc.;
• the middle vital, which contains the larger life energies of power, ambition and self-assertion; and
• the higher vital, which deals with the more sophisticated emotions in the social realm.

We'll come back to these in the context of our discussion of the cakras.

The mind

In the mind we meet again an entirely different type of consciousness. The mind as such is not into self-assertion, though the vital life-force may enlist it for that purpose. The mind is into modelling reality: it (re)presents reality to itself, thinks about it, uses it to plan action, and expresses its mental constructions to itself and others. One can look at the nervous system, with which our mind tends to identify itself, as an incredibly complicated, multi-dimensional model-making machinery.

How completely different mind and vital are can be easily illustrated with the difference between the digestive system and the brain: when the stomach tackles an apple, the apple is destroyed: It is taken apart into its constituting molecules that are subsequently used to provide the energy and stuff which the animal who eats the apple needs to live and reconstruct itself. At the end of the digestive process there is no trace of the apple, but the apple-eating animal is strengthened. When, on the other hand, the eyes tackle an apple, the apple remains what it is, and the animal creates an image, a hugely complex, multidimensional mental model of the apple, which the thinking creature can subsequently use for further action.

Interestingly, the mind as we find it, embodied in living creatures has undergone a disabling diminution that is quite similar to the degradation life underwent when it got embodied in matter. While mind at its best expresses intuitive ideas that come to it, ready-made, from above; mind as it develops within living matter makes "bottom-up" constructions, half-baked models of reality on the basis of the senses, memory and whatever else it can press into service to this end. Again, it is part of yoga to still this endless labour of construction and recover the mind's ability to open up to the knowledge that comes ready-made from above and within.

Just as the fully developed manifestations of embodied life are many orders of magnitude more complex than those of inorganic matter, the brain, as physical substrate for the mind's activity in this evolving physical world, is many orders of magnitude more complex than any other biological structure.

About the mind as it manifests in us, human beings, Sri Aurobindo writes:

The "Mind" in the ordinary use of the word covers indiscriminately the whole consciousness, for man is a mental being and mentalises everything; but in the language of this yoga the words "mind" and "mental" are used to connote specially the part of the nature which has to do with cognition and intelligence, with ideas, with mental or thought perceptions, the reactions of thought to things, with the truly mental movements and formations, mental vision and will, etc., that are part of his intelligence.

— Sri Aurobindo, Letters on Yoga, p. 326

The Mother says about the dynamic, action supporting aspect of the mind:

For the true role of the mind is the formation and organisation of action. The mind has a formative and organising power, and it is that which puts the different elements of inspiration in order, for action, for organising action. And if it would only confine itself to that role, receiving inspirations — whether from above or from the mystic centre of the soul — and simply formulating the plan of action — in broad outline or in minute detail, for the smallest things of life or the great terrestrial organisations — it would amply fulfil its function.

It is not an instrument of knowledge. But it can use knowledge for action, to organise action. It is an instrument of organisation and formation, very powerful and very capable when it is well developed.

One can feel this very clearly when one wants to organise one's life, for instance — to put the different elements in their place in one's existence. There is a certain intellectual faculty which immediately puts each thing in its place and makes a plan and organises. And it is not a knowledge that comes from the mind, it is a knowledge which comes, as I said, from the mystic depths of the soul or from a higher consciousness; and the mind concentrates it in the physical world and organises it to give a basis of action to the higher consciousness. One has this experience very clearly when one wants to organise one's life.

Then, there is another use. When one is in contact with one's reason, with the rational centre of the intellect, the pure reason, it is a powerful control over all vital impulses. All that comes from the vital world can be very firmly controlled by it and used in a disciplined and organised action. But it must be at the service of something else—not work for its own satisfaction.

These are the two uses of the mind: it is a controlling force, an instrument of control, and it is a power of organisation. That is its true place.

— the Mother, MCW, Vol. 8, p. 189

The Sanskrit word manas is generally used for the entire plane of mind. But manas is also used in a much more restricted sense. In many classical texts, eg in Patanjali's Yogasutras, a division is made between manas and buddhi. Manas indicates here not so much a plane or type of consciousness, but simply the sense-mind, whose job it is to coordinate the five passive and five active indriyas (the five senses and the five instrumnts of action). The buddhi is the "enlightened intellect", the mental function that covers everything from the ordinary thinking mind or intellect up to the highest spirituality, which in such texts is often taken to be the ānandamayakośa.

The mind intersects with the vital and the physical plane. On that basis Sri Aurobindo distinguishes between the:

• Sense mind (the intersection of the mind with the physical)
• Emotional mind (the intersection of the mind with the vital)
• Thinking mind (the mind proper)

The mind proper is subdivided by Sri Aurobindo into five clearly distinct sub-planes that represent essentially different types of mental consciousness. The first is the

• ordinary mind

Sri Aurobindo has further subdivided the ordinary mind on different occasions in different ways, using slightly different categories. For example:

• Expressive mind. As this part of the mind mainly deals with externalizing of mental stuff into the physical world, there is a considerable overlap with the physical mind discussed earlier.
• Dynamic mind. This is the aspect of the mind discussed in the quote from the Mother given earlier. It deals with planning and the will.
• Thinking mind, which as we saw above is also called the mind proper.

Similar, but stressing a gradation of openness to intuition:

• Habitual or mechanical mind, repeating itself endlessly, obstinately resisting change, in short: the mind under the reign of tamas.
• Pragmatic mind, dealing with action and practical things.
• Pure ideative mind, consisting of thoughts and ideas, more or less for their own sake.

Sri Aurobindo groups the layers above the ordinary mind together as the higher consciousness.

Still within the mental plane (manas) we find the Higher mind, Illumined mind, Intuition and Overmind. Sri Aurobindo describes them as follows:

• Higher mind

I mean by the Higher Mind a first plane of spiritual consciousness where one becomes constantly and closely aware of the Self, the One everywhere and knows and sees things habitually with that awareness; but it is still very much on the mind level although highly spiritual in its essential substance; and its instrumentation is through an elevated thought-power and comprehensive mental sight — not illumined by any of the intenser upper lights but as if in a large strong and clear daylight. It acts as an intermediate state between the Truth-Light above and the human mind; communicating the higher knowledge in a form that the Mind intensified, broadened, made spiritually supple, can receive without being blinded or dazzled by a Truth beyond it.

— Sri Aurobindo, Letters on Poetry and Art, p. 20

• Illumined mind

… a Mind no longer of higher Thought, but of spiritual light. Here the clarity of the spiritual intelligence, its tranquil daylight, gives place or subordinates itself to an intense lustre, a splendour and illumination of the spirit: a play of lightnings of spiritual truth and power breaks from above into the consciousness and adds to the calm and wide enlightenment and the vast descent of peace which characterise or accompany the action of the larger conceptual-spiritual principle, a fiery ardour of realisation and a rapturous ecstasy of knowledge.

— Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine, p. 978

• Intuition

Intuition is a power of consciousness nearer and more intimate to the original knowledge by identity; for it is always something that leaps out direct from a concealed identity. It is when the consciousness of the subject meets with the consciousness in the object, penetrates it and sees, feels or vibrates with the truth of what it contacts, that the intuition leaps out like a spark or lightning-flash from the shock of the meeting; or when the consciousness, even without any such meeting, looks into itself and feels directly and intimately the truth or the truths that are there or so contacts the hidden forces behind appearances, then also there is the outbreak of an intuitive light; or, again, when the consciousness meets the Supreme Reality or the spiritual reality of things and beings and has a contactual union with it, then the spark, the flash or the blaze of intimate truth-perception is lit in its depths.
...
Intuition has a fourfold power. A power of revelatory truth-seeing, a power of inspiration or truth-hearing, a power of truth-touch or immediate seizing of significance, which is akin to the ordinary nature of its intervention in our mental intelligence, a power of true and automatic discrimination of the orderly and exact relation of truth to truth,—these are the fourfold potencies of Intuition. Intuition can therefore perform all the action of reason—including the function of logical intelligence, which is to work out the right relation of things and the right relation of idea with idea,—but by its own superior process and with steps that do not fail or falter.

— Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine, p. 981-85

Intutition as the typal plane between the Illumined Mind and the Overmind is the highest typal plane that is still, to some extent at least, individualised. It is the source of the truth that can be found in the planes of the Illumined Mind and the Higher Mind. While in our ordinary mind, intuitions tend to come down like individual lightning, in the typal plane that Sri Aurobindo called "Intuition", "its rays are not separated but connected or massed together in a play of waves of what might almost be called in the Sanskrit poetic figure a sea or mass of 'stable lightnings'".

Sri Aurobindo uses the term "Intuitive Mind" in a few places for this same typal plane, but he uses it more commonly for the embodied thinking mind, when its stuff and functionings are largely taken over by the Intuition.

The next higher plane, the Overmind is fully and intrinsically cosmic in nature.

• Overmind

It may be noted that the term overmind for the topmost layer of the lower hemisphere was introduced by Sri Aurobindo only after the Arya period (1914-1920). In the unrevised parts of The Synthesis of Yoga (a part of The Yoga of Divine Knowledge, The Yoga of Devotion and The Yoga of Self-Perfection) the words "supermind" and "supramental" are not yet used in the specific sense he later gave to them. In these texts, they are often used to denote what he later called the overmind, and sometimes even simply to denote anything above the ordinary mind. For a clear exposition of the difference, see his Letters on Yoga (Part I, p. 149 onwards).

… the overmind knows the One as the support, essence, fundamental power of all things, but in the dynamic play proper to it it lays emphasis on its divisional power of multiplicity and seeks to give each power or Aspect its full chance to manifest, relying on the underlying Oneness to prevent disharmony or conflict. Each Godhead, as it were, creates his own world, but without conflict with others; each Aspect, each Idea, each Force of things can be felt in its full separate energy or splendour and work out its values, but this does not create a disharmony, because the overmind has the sense of the Infinite and in the true (not spatial) Infinite many concording infinities are possible.

— Sri Aurobindo, Letters on Yoga, p. 248

***

In its nature and law the Overmind is a delegate of the Supermind Consciousness, its delegate to the Ignorance. Or we might speak of it as a protective double, a screen of dissimilar similarity through which Supermind can act indirectly on an Ignorance whose darkness could not bear or receive the direct impact of a supreme Light. Even, it is by the projection of this luminous Overmind corona that the diffusion of a diminished light in the Ignorance and the throwing of that contrary shadow which swallows up in itself all light, the Inconscience, became at all possible. For Supermind transmits to Overmind all its realities, but leaves it to formulate them in a movement and according to an awareness of things which is still a vision of Truth and yet at the same time a first parent of the Ignorance.

— Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine, p. 307

Above the Overmind

The layers above the overmind, Sri Aurobindo groups together as the divine consciousness or upper hemisphere.

Sri Aurobindo describes the Supermind as follows:

The Supermind is in its very essence a truth-consciousness, a consciousness always free from the Ignorance which is the foundation of our present natural or evolutionary existence and from which nature in us is trying to arrive at self-knowledge and world-knowledge and a right consciousness and the right use of our existence in the universe. The Supermind, because it is a truth-consciousness, has this knowledge inherent in it and this power of true existence; its course is straight and can go direct to its aim, its field is wide and can even be made illimitable. This is because its very nature is knowledge: it has not to acquire knowledge but possesses it in its own right; its steps are not from nescience or ignorance into some imperfect light, but from truth to greater truth, from right perception to deeper perception, from intuition to intuition, from illumination to utter and boundless luminousness, from growing widenesses to the utter vasts and to very infinitude. On its summits it possesses the divine omniscience and omnipotence, but even in an evolutionary movement of its own graded self-manifestation by which it would eventually reveal its own highest heights, it must be in its very nature essentially free from ignorance and error: it starts from truth and light and moves always in truth and light. As its knowledge is always true, so too its will is always true; it does not fumble in its handling of things or stumble in its paces. In the Supermind feeling and emotion do not depart from their truth, make no slips or mistakes, do not swerve from the right and the real, cannot misuse beauty and delight or twist away from a divine rectitude. In the Supermind sense cannot mislead or deviate into the grossnesses which are here its natural imperfections and the cause of reproach, distrust and misuse by our ignorance. Even an incomplete statement made by the Supermind is a truth leading to a further truth, its incomplete action a step towards completeness. All the life and action and leading of the Supermind is guarded in its very nature from the falsehoods and uncertainties that are our lot; it moves in safety towards its perfection.

— Sri Aurobindo, Essays in Philosophy and Yoga, p. 570

And above the supermind the upper or divine hemisphere of

• Ānanda, pure, absolute Delight
• Cit-Tapas, pure, absolute Consciousness-Force
• Sat, pure, absolute Existence

We'll discuss the distinction Sri Aurobindo makes between Overmind and Supermind, his re-discovery of the Vedic ṛtam (dynamic Truth), and the related stress he gave in his yoga to what he called the psychic being in more detail in the last section.

Shadows of the higher planes within the lower planes

Sri Aurobindo warns at several places that there are formations and deformed shadows of the higher planes within the lower planes. This can give the unwary, hasty or over-ambitious visitor to these lower planes the illusion of having "realised" the higher planes. The only effective antidote against this is sincerity and a basic sense of humility, but, as the transpersonal literature shows, these are qualities that are somewhat rare amongst those who have the audacity to write in this area (which includes the present author).

The cakras

The cakras have been subject to much useless mystification and pseudo-spiritual sensationalism, but they refer to a set of experiences that occur sometimes spontaneously and that are fairly common amongst those who meditate or do yoga. Even the rising of the kuṇḍalinī, the psychic energy, from the mūlādhāra at the base of the spine to the sahasrāra at the crown of the head does occur sometimes without any specific effort or training. Perhaps more importantly, the cakras relate to different types of consciousness that seem to be stacked up one above the other in our inner, subtle physical body, the sūkṣma śarīra. They are easily recognisable by most people and are commonly referred to in the English language: we all know that businessmen follow their gut-feelings, that charitable organisations ask us to open our heart, and that teachers admonish children to use their head.

As centres of consciousness, the cakras clearly belong to the puruṣa side of the puruṣa-prakṛti divide, but they preside over corresponding centres in the inner nature. As they are as much centres of force as of awareness, one finds them more often discussed in Tantric literature than in Vedanta.

• The highest cakra, the sahasrāra is located at the crown of the head. It houses the spiritual mind, and is for obvious reasons not much mentioned in the English language, though there may be a vague reference to it in the fact that highfalutin ideas are said to go “over one's head”. It is through here that inspirations are most often felt to enter.
• Just below it, the ājñā cakra, the thinking mind proper is located behind the forehead. This is the location where philosophers and academics feel that their consciousness resides. Again, a child who needs to think more clearly is asked to use his head, not his heart, let alone his guts.
• Below the ājñā cakra, at the level of the throat, comes the viśuddha in the lowest mental layer, the expressive mind. Its character depends on what it expresses: it can express vital feelings coming from below as well as thoughts and inspirations from above. It is not only concerned with verbal and vocal expressions, it is also active in other forms of creative work.
• The anāhata at the level of the heart, lodges the higher vital consciousness. It carries the more sophisticated human emotions of love, compassion etc. If you want to encourage someone to be more generous or compassionate you don't say: “open your head”, you say, “open your heart”.
• Below it, we find the maṇipūra, housing the middle vital with our larger ambitions for power and possession. This is the Hara of Japanese martial arts, and also the source of what businessmen call “gut-feelings”. Significantly, “having guts” means being courageous and daring, qualities that occur when one's consciousness is powerfully present at this level.
• Below it, is the svādhiṣṭhāna, the cakra of the lower vital consciousness where we find sexuality and the search for minor, personal comforts.
• The last cakra, at the bottom of the spine, is the mūlādhāra, the seat of the kuṇḍalinī energy, and the physical consciousness.

Interestingly, the different layers are in English also used to indicate specific kinds of unease: there is a commonly understood difference between butterflies in one's stomach, a heartache, a lump in one's throat, and a headache.

Finally it may be noted that the gutsy(!), flowery language in which these various centres of consciousness are addressed in English suggests that though they are part of our common understanding of human nature, and though they have quite a prominent place in literature, they have not been given much attention in academics. This is unfortunate, because a clear understanding of these different centres can help considerably with the development of insight and mastery over one's drives and motives. The ability to locate the centre of one's consciousness in any of them at will should in fact be considered an important life-skill, which could quite well be taught in school. It appears that the conceptual mix-up of thinking and consciousness has led to the idea that not only thinking but also every other type of consciousness is generated in the brain, and that this has stood in the way of psychologist paying any attention to this otherwise interesting phenomenon.

Levels of awareness

Besides the sevenfold chord of being and the cakras, there is still another set of terms that describe states which subjectively are experienced as a vertically arranged hierarchy. They describe levels or degrees of awareness, from bottom up: inconscient, subconscient, ordinary waking conscience and superconscient.

The inconscient base of the creation Sri Aurobindo also calls the nescient.

The word subconscious Sri Aurobindo uses with two somewhat different meanings. He uses it sometimes simply to indicate all that is below our ordinary consciousness (in other words, as a synonym for the subliminal), but he uses it more typically for a specific plane situated "below the physical consciousness". In that last sense, the subconscient contains the first crude beginning of conscious movement when creation just arises out of the sleep of the inconscient. But into this nether region also sinks back whatever has been rejected from the higher levels of consciousness, and so come into being the murky waters that Freud describes as the "unconscious". This is the place from where rise up the thousands of atavisms that mar our progress.

In our yoga we mean by the subconscient that quite submerged part of our being in which there is no wakingly conscious and coherent thought, will or feeling or organized reaction, but which yet receives obscurely the impressions of all things and stores them up in itself and from it too all sorts of stimuli, of persistent habitual movements, crudely repeated or disguised in strange forms can surge up into dream or into the waking nature. For if these impressions rise up most in dream in an incoherent and disorganized manner, they can also and do rise up into our waking consciousness as a mechanical repetition of old thoughts, old mental, vital and physical habits or an obscure stimulus to sensations, actions, emotions which do not originate in or from our conscious thought or will and are even often opposed to its perceptions, choice or dictates. In the subconscient there is an obscure mind full of obstinate Sanskaras, impressions, associations, fixed notions, habitual reactions formed by our past, an obscure vital full of the seeds of habitual desires, sensations and nervous reactions, a most obscure material which governs much that has to do with the condition of the body. It is largely responsible for our illnesses; chronic or repeated illnesses are indeed mainly due to the subconscient and its obstinate memory and habit of repetition of whatever has impressed itself upon the body-consciousness. But this subconscient must be clearly distinguished from the subliminal parts of our being such as the inner or subtle physical consciousness, the inner vital or inner mental; for these are not at all obscure or incoherent or ill-organized, but only veiled from our surface consciousness. Our surface constantly receives something, inner touches, communications or influences, from these sources but does not know for the most part whence they come.

— Sri Aurobindo, Letters on Yoga, p. 360

***

That part of us which we can strictly call subconscient because it is below the level of mind and conscious life, inferior and obscure, covers the purely physical and vital elements of our constitution of bodily being, unmentalised, unobserved by the mind, uncontrolled by it in their action. It can be held to include the dumb occult consciousness, dynamic but not sensed by us, which operates in the cells and nerves and all the corporeal stuff and adjusts their life process and automatic responses. It covers also those lowest functionings of submerged sense-mind which are more operative in the animal and in plant life; in our evolution we have overpassed the need of any large organised action of this element, but it remains submerged and obscurely at work below our conscious nature. This obscure activity extends to a hidden and hooded mental substratum into which past impressions and all that is rejected from the surface mind sink and remain there dormant and can surge up in sleep or in any absence of the mind, taking dream forms, forms of mechanical mind action or suggestion, forms of automatic vital reaction or impulse, forms of physical abnormality or nervous perturbance, forms of morbidity, disease, unbalance. Out of the subconscious we bring ordinarily so much to the surface as our waking sense-mind and intelligence need for their purpose; in so bringing them up we are not aware of their nature, origin, operation and do not apprehend them in their own values but by a translation into the values of our waking human sense and intelligence. But the risings of the subconscious, its effects upon the mind and body, are mostly automatic, uncalled for and involuntary; for we have no knowledge and therefore no control of the subconscient. It is only by an experience abnormal to us, most commonly in illness or some disturbance of balance, that we can become aware of something in the dumb world, dumb but very active, of our bodily being and vitality or grow conscious of the secret movements of the mechanical subhuman physical and vital mind which underlies our surface, — a consciousness which is ours but seems not ours because it is not part of our known mentality. This and much more lives concealed in the subconscience.

A descent into the subconscient would not help us to explore this region, for it would plunge us into incoherence or into sleep or a dull trance or a comatose torpor. A mental scrutiny or insight can give us some indirect and constructive idea of these hidden activities; but it is only by drawing back into the subliminal or by ascending into the superconscient and from there looking down or extending ourselves into these obscure depths that we can become directly and totally aware and in control of the secrets of our subconscient physical, vital and mental nature. This awareness, this control are of the utmost importance. For the subconscient is the Inconscient in the process of becoming conscious; it is a support and even a root of our inferior parts of being and their movements. It sustains and reinforces all in us that clings most and refuses to change, our mechanical recurrences of unintelligent thought, our persistent obstinacies of feeling, sensation, impulse, propensity, our uncontrolled fixities of character. The animal in us, — the infernal also, — has its lair of retreat in the dense jungle of the subconscience. To penetrate there, to bring in light and establish a control, is indispensable for the completeness of any higher life, for any integral transformation of the nature.

— Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine, p. 762

Our ordinary waking consciousness is limited to a small portion of the physical, vital and lower mental planes. Most of what happens on the physical, vital, and mental planes remains below its threshold of awareness.

The higher ranges of the mental plane, the supramental and saccidānanda are entirely superconscient to it. The words superconscious and superconscient are both used by Sri Aurobindo again with two different meanings, simply for any consciousness which is above our ordinary waking consciousness (in other words as synonym for higher consciousness) and, more specifically, for that type of consciousness which is divine, that is, beyond dualities.

Sri Aurobindo does not use the term "the unconscious". Freud's "unconscious" covers more or less what Sri Aurobindo calls the lower vital regions of the subconscious. Jung's "unconscious" has some overlap with Sri Aurobindo's subliminal.

Overview of terms used for the vertical system in one table

We can now put the most important terms used for the vertical system together in one table as follows:

It may be noted that in terms of the concentric system, everything in this table belongs to the subliminal. The only exception might be the ordinary waking consciousness and its share of the ignorance, but one could argue that in the ordinary waking consciousness even the ordinary waking consciousness itself belongs to the subliminal! The reason is that most people most of the time are so fully identified with the part of the surface mind where their consciousness happens to be centred, that they are only aware of the content with which that mind is busy. So even when they engage, for example, in introspection, they may become aware of the mental and vital processes that are happening inside their consciousness, but they will still not be aware of the consciousness itself, let alone of its ignorance.

More important is to realise that one should not take this scheme too seriously. To be more specific, the names in the cells of this table do not denote things. They do no more than pointing at concepts which consist of complex mixtures of meanings and connotations whose borders tend to be far more vague than the neat lines in this diagram suggest. Though I hope it is useful for those who enjoy such things, it has to be used with utmost caution and humility. Even the simplest flower surpasses whatever our minds can possibly create.

4.   the centre of identification

As we have seen, our nature is immensely complex. It is constituted out of many different parts and they all have their own history, character and priorities for action. In order to present "one face" both to the outside world and to ourselves, we need something to coordinate all these different tendencies, and as long as we have not found our real Self, it is the ego that fulfils this role.

The ego

At one place in The Life Divine Sri Aurobindo describes the ego as follows:

But what is this strongly separative self-experience that we call ego? It is nothing fundamentally real in itself but only a practical constitution of our consciousness devised to centralise the activities of Nature in us. We perceive a formation of mental, physical, vital experience which distinguishes itself from the rest of being, and that is what we think of as ourselves in nature — this individualisation of being in becoming. We then proceed to conceive of ourselves as something which has thus individualised itself and only exists so long as it is individualised, — a temporary or at least a temporal becoming; or else we conceive of ourselves as someone who supports or causes the individualisation, an immortal being perhaps but limited by its individuality. This perception and this conception constitute our ego-sense. Normally, we go no farther in our knowledge of our individual existence.

— Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine, p. 382-383

In other words, Sri Aurobindo sees the ego as a temporary, makeshift arrangement nature has made to centralise our action and to provide a focus-point for our sense of identity. Interestingly, neither the character, nor the centre and borders of our ego are fixed. When we talk to one of our siblings, we become a sister or brother, when we are with our parents we function as their child, with our children as parent, and when we talk with our neighbours we suddenly represent our family as a whole. When we watch a football match, we identify with our city or country, when we talk about feminism, we grow aware of our gender, in our concern for "the environment" we can identify with the planet, and when we have hurt a toe, we retire to the central command of our little, individual, bodily existence. In other words, the borders of our ego and the centre of our identity shift continuously, from second to second.

According to the Indian tradition, the ego is a formation of the mind, but as its energy is provided by the vital, its functioning tends to be dominated by the vital's need for self-assertion. As its right to exist is far from intrinsic and in many ways precarious, the ego tends to be in constant need of "moral support" and it engages in a lot of defensive action, not all of which is appropriate or helpful. A common way for the ego to defend itself is to stress the superior quality of its achievements, character, possessions and social contacts. But the opposite also happens. One can defend oneself against social pressure not only by asserting oneself strongly, but also by getting out of the way of others, by dissimulating one's very existence.

Modern society is ambivalent about the ego. Egoism, egotism, and ego-centricity are clearly undesirable, if only because they clash with the same traits in others, but lack of ego-strength leads to difficulties in keeping oneself together and to an inability to withstand the pressure of others. It is thus not surprising that a "healthy ego" is widely considered essential for psychological health and well-being, especially amongst professional psychologists (who often meet people who do not have a sufficiently healthy ego). Amongst those who "do yoga", however, one does not often hear praise for the ego and its heroic antics. Here, the ego is more often derided as the villain of the piece. The reason for this is that once one is "on the path" one tends to realise sooner or later that in a most literal sense all suffering is due to ego.

Shifting the border between self and world inwards

Though, as we have seen, the exact border of what we identify with as our "self" is perpetually shifting, this border is in our ordinary waking consciousness almost always outside our body, mind, and personality. In the Indian tradition the borders of the self are much further inside: the puruṣa, the Self, contains only our pure consciousness, while our personality and all mental processes belong to universal Nature, prakṛti. An essential element of Yoga is to shift one's centre of identification from the temporary formation of the ego, which is part of the outer nature, to the true Self in the central being.

The "I" or the little ego is constituted by Nature and is at once a mental, vital and physical formation meant to aid in centralizing and individualising the outer consciousness and action. When the true being is discovered, the utility of the ego is over and this formation has to disappear—the true being is felt in its place.

— Sri Aurobindo, Letters on Yoga, p. 277

The central being

We can experience our central, innermost, or true being as a kind of vertical axis at the core of our being. Above all the planes and worlds, it is the jīvātman, who eternally and immutably presides over our nature. Sri Aurobindo uses the word "Self" for this transcendent, immutable essence, both in its universal form (paramātman), and in its individual form (jīvātman). The difference between the two is that while the jīvātman is transcendent just like the paramātman, it is not any longer anantaguna, of infinite quality: it is the carrier of our spiritual individuality, and with that of our individual svabhāva and svadharma, our essential individual nature and truth of action.

There is however not only a Self above the manifest reality, but there is also a distinct Self or puruṣa on each plane or level of consciousness. These "plane specific" Selves function as the centre of our conscious existence on that level.

On each of the three lower planes (physical, vital and mental) we have besides this plane-specific Self, also plane-specific aspects of our inner and outer nature. The combination of a plane-specific Self with a corresponding part of nature, Sri Aurobindo calls a being. So we can speak of an inner and an outer physical being, an inner and an outer vital being, an inner and an outer mental being. Sri Aurobindo speaks about the true being — the true mental being for example — when on one the planes one's entire inner and outer nature is under the full, conscious control of the innermost or true Self of that plane.

The soul: from psychic entity to psychic being

The psychic centre stands behind all this. It has descended, as the delegate of our jīvātman, our eternal Self, into the "world of becoming" and supports our whole nature through the individual Selves on each plane. Initially this psychic centre (antaratman, chaitya puruṣa) is only a small, almost point-like psychic entity. It is the tiny kernel of truth that hides below the otherwise false sense which the ego has of its own reality and importance. Initially it can be felt in the surface nature at best as a psychic influence. Gradually, however, as it grows, or to say it differently, as it brings (over many life times) more and more of one's inner and outer nature under its influence, it becomes a full-fledged psychic being, which one can experience as a psychic presence. When this presence is strong and sensed even by other people, they may say of such a person that he or she is "an old soul". In a still later stage there can be a complete reversal, through which the psychic being becomes one's one and only identity.

The word "soul" Sri Aurobindo uses quite often in the common English sense for anything our "I" can identify with. In this more common sense, he can speak for example about the "desire soul". More typically he uses it, however, for this evolving, psychic centre.

The true being may be realized in one or both of two aspects — the Self or ātman and the soul or antaratman, psychic being, chaitya puruṣa. The difference is that one is felt as universal, the other as individual supporting the mind, life, and body. When one first realizes the ātman one feels it separate from all things, existing in itself and detached. When one realizes the psychic being, it is not like that; for this brings the sense of union with the Divine and dependence upon It and sole consecration to the Divine alone and the power to change the nature and discover the true mental, the true vital, the true physical being in oneself. Both realisations are necessary for this yoga.

— Sri Aurobindo, Letters on Yoga, p. 277

While the outer layers of our being remain for a long time determined by the forces working in the surrounding outer nature, the inner layers generally come more easily under influence of the psychic element.

One must first acquire an inner yogic consciousness and replace by it our ordinary view of things, natural movements, motives of life; one must revolutionize 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. Afterwards or concurrently, we have to spiritualize the being in its entirety by a descent of a divine Light, Force, Purity, Knowledge, freedom, and wideness. It is necessary to break down the limits of the personal mind, life and physicality, dissolve the ego, enter into the cosmic consciousness, realize the self, acquire a spiritualized and universalized mind and heart, life-force, physical consciousness. Then only the passage into supramental consciousness begins to become possible, and even then, there is a difficult ascent to make each stage of which is a separate arduous achievement.

— Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis of Yoga, p. 281

It may be noted that the distinction Sri Aurobindo makes between an eternal, immutable, transcendent Self above, and an evolving soul deep within who functions as its delegate in this manifest world, is not commonly made within the Indian tradition. The reason is that the existence of an evolving soul-personality is only interesting in the context of an ongoing evolution of consciousness where the ultimate aim is the manifestation of various aspects of the Divine in an ever-evolving material world. If the ultimate aim is dissolution, merger with the transcendent Divine, mokṣa or nirvāṇa, the personality, however well-developed it may become on the way, has to be shed in the end: It is no more than a carrier of one's karma and saṁskāras while the journey is on, and has to be left behind at the end. The easiest way to do this is to pay no attention to it whatsoever beyond the fact that it should become so pure and satvic that it doesnot create any attachment. That gets conceptualized most conveniently when one looks at the soul only as a centre of pure consciousness, found inside, but otherwise just like the jīvātman above. Ramana Maharshi for example speaks of the antaratman, but acknowledges only its pure, immutable presence, not is evolving nature.

It is now time to see how the horizontal and vertical systems and the various centres of identity all "hang together".

5.   bringing it all together

Before we can put all the elements we have discussed together, we must realize that the divisions made as part of the concentric system, apply equally to each of the three lowest layers of the vertical system. So there is an outer, inner and innermost mental; an outer, inner and innermost vital; and even an outer, inner and innermost physical. Or to list them the other way around: we can distinguish mental, vital and physical aspects in our outer nature, our inner nature, and even in our innermost Self. One reason why this is important is that people can have quite different characteristics and levels of development in the various areas that constitute their personality.

Within the outer nature, for example, a person can be strong in body but weak in mind; flexible in his ideas but unforgiving in his feelings; possessive about his ideas, but generous in physical things; and of course the opposites are equally possible.

Similarly, within the inner region, we are according to virtually all occult traditions in direct contact with each other, but our capacity to bring that inner knowledge to our surface nature may differ from person to person and plane to plane. So someone might be very open to other people's thoughts knowing what or how people think even at a distance when there is no outer contact, but the same person might be quite insensitive to their feelings. And again, the opposite may also be there: someone may sense directly, without any outer clue or contact what someone else feels but he may not have any idea about what or how the other thinks. In the inner physical, some people can feel concretely, as if in their own body, the physical sensations of other people, and yet they may not be particularly sensitive to their feelings or thoughts. In short: virtually all combinations are possible.

The situation is slightly different regarding the "Selves" on the different planes. The Self differs considerably from one plane to the other, but tends to be similar in its basic characteristics from one person to the next. The mental Self, the manomaya puruṣa, is for example most typically the witness: from here one watches with perfect equanimity what happens in oneself and one's surroundings: there are no comments, no judgements. In the vital Self there is also equanimity, but here it is an equanimity of feeling: there is a steady, self-existing joy and energy, that streams freely, unencumbered. The physical Self has most typically a strong, unperturbed peace and calm. All three tend to be impersonal, vast, blissful and universal, but each has these qualities in a different way.

Another reason why these distinctions are useful is that it is so important where in this system one places the centre of one's consciousness. A typical example may make this clear. An academic hears that a colleague has a better idea than what he himself has come up with. If the first academic lives predominantly in his surface mind, he will be excited and happy, as the idea from the colleague will enable him to construct a better model of reality than the one he had managed on his own. If, on the other hand, he received the news while residing in his surface vital, he might feel threatened as the human vital is not at all bothered about truth: it is a life-force and it is into self-assertion, and so he might fear that his colleague's prowess might endanger his own position in the power hierarchy of his office. If, again, he lived in the higher ranges of the inner mind, he might immediately "see" how the new idea would hang together with a whole range of other ideas. If he would live in a deeper range of the inner vital, he might be happy for his colleague, especially if the latter needed a little boost in life. If he would live still deeper within, he would not have any automatic reactivity: In the mental Self, he would just continue watching events unfold on the physical, vital and mental planes; in the vital Self, he would remain energetically, enthusiastically "present" in the midst of the play of forces. If we look in more detail we realize, as we already saw in our discussion of the cakras, that there are actually three clearly distinct vital selves. In the anāhata he would be aware mainly of higher emotional feelings like sympathy and love at play during the discussion; in the manipura he would be aware primarily of the power play between the ambitions of the protagonists in the debate; in the lower vital, he would be aware of the smaller, individual life-sensations. On all the sublevels of the innermost vital realm he would however not react, not get involved as long as he stayed within the innermost realm of his personality; he would be happily, energetically, yet completely impartially, present. In the innermost physical he would again be nonreactive, but peacefully, eternally, impersonally present amidst the physical aspects and circumstances of the discussion.

It may be clear that by default people differ considerably both regarding the plane and the depth from which they live most typically. As discussed earlier, learning how to shift the location of one's consciousness at will is an immensely useful skill, a skill that is actually not that terribly difficult to master, and that could be taught quite well as part of elementary education.

Some diagrams

Keeping in mind once more that reality is always much more complex than the models we can make of it, we are now in a position to put some of the things we have discussed together into three diagrams that may help those with a more "visual" type of intelligence. it may be kept in mind that these diagrams are only intended to depict in graphic form how the different parts of the personality conceptually relate to each other. They are not intended to depict reality in any other way!

Figure 2 indicates how the concentric system depicted in figure 1. applies to all three planes of the lower hemisphere, the physical, vital and mental. If the grey sheet that has been labelled "Section" is unfolded, we get the backdrop for the conceptual relationships indicated in figure 3 and figure 4.

Figure 3. indicates the most prominent elements of human nature together in a simple, two-dimensional diagram.

Figure 4 shows a somewhat more detailed rendering of the same model. Along the vertical axis, we have listed the various planes belonging to the vertical system, and below the diagram some of the terms indicating the concentric system.

On the left of the yellow line is our essential Self, our puruṣa, our consciousness. On the right of the blue line is our outer nature, which is all most people are aware of. In between the two vertical lines are the inner worlds. The most dark corner of this realm, the subconscient, has been explored to some extent by psychoanalysis. The rest can be explored only by inner, yoga-based sciences.

The various elements that appear in these overviews have all been discussed in the previous sections of this chapter, but there are a few things that may still deserve some special attention: mainstream's dualism of body and mind, and the three closely related issues of consciousness as power, the nature of the link-plane between the lower and higher hemispheres, and the concept of an evolving soul.

Mainstreams's mind/body dualism

In mainstream scientific thought, "life" (or "the vital") is nowadays not recognised as a separate category. In a way, this is understandable as the division in three — matter, life and mind — may not be immediately clear in the surface realm that science deals with. On the surface of our personality, almost everything we do and are is mixed. The presence of life as a separate power becomes fully clear only in the subliminal inner realm where one can feel emotions for example as they are by themselves before they are rendered in words and before they effect the body. What is more problematic is that the remaining duality of mind/body is seen by many in the science community as all there is to the world. It may appear at first sight that we should not complain about this over-simplification. After all, the mind/body division seems to have worked rather well. Unfortunately, it has worked well for only one of the two halves: The hard sciences have made tremendous progress since this division freed them from the confusing pressure of values and religious dogma. The study of physical reality as if it consisted of a causally closed system of purely physical things and forces that obey laws that can be described exhaustively in the language of mathematics, has been stunningly effective and it provides us with an endless stream of addictive goodies. There is a problem, however, with the other half of the equation, the mind. Everything in these diagrams, except for the hard outer physical reality, is put together under "mind": not only thinking and sensing, feelings and attitudes, but also, as far as these are acknowledged to exist at all, even consciousness, the soul, the self, inner and higher worlds, and for all we know, even our sense of "the Divine". Things get worse when it is assumed that all these are generated in the brain, and even more so when the mind-body dualism is equated with the distinction between software and hardware. Consciousness is then put aside as an emergent, epiphenomenal side-effect of chemical processes, and with that, virtually everything that makes us human and life worth living, including love, meaning, beauty, courage, gratitude and all the rest of what we humans are subjectively, is reduced to intrinsically meaningless brain-produced chemical processes.

In our rather imbalanced civilization, the outer physical reality, which is such a small part of all that we humans are and care about, is the only area that the standard methodologies of mainstream science are really good at researching. But within this limited area science has made such phenomenal progress — and provided such enticing gadgets — that we have started believing that this is really all that we can know and all that is worth knowing.

Within mainstream science only a few brave attempts have been made to go beyond: psychoanalysis, parapsychology, and transpersonal psychology. All three are under perpetual siege and far from universally accepted, and so our knowledge of the middle and left parts of the diagram has hardly developed.

The area Sri Aurobindo calls the inner nature has at best a somewhat shadowy existence in various subcultures mostly at the borders of society. Interestingly, even within the Indian tradition, this area has been dealt with somewhat step motherly as the siddhis and other "occult" phenomena of the middle realm are traditionally viewed as dangerous distractions from the noble pursuit of liberation and enlightenment.

The innermost realm seems at first sight to have had, at least in India, a better deal culturally than the in-between inner realm, as it is in this innermost part of our being that we find who we really are and what the ultimate aim is of our individual and collective existence. But here also there are problems, and the most serious of them are related to a gradual decline that according to Sri Aurobindo has taken place in India's fundamental understanding of the nature of consciousness and reality. We'll look now at two aspects of this, first the question whether consciousness is also power, or only awareness, and then at the scope of real perfection within the manifest reality.

Consciousness as power

While popular religion takes the Divine as both personal and powerful, high-brow philosophy tends to look at ultimate reality as impersonal and inactive. In Transpersonal psychology too, the dominant position is to take the pure consciousness of the innermost realm as uncontaminated by power and personality. Regarding personality, Indian philosophy cherishes both viewpoints and whether "the Divine" should be considered to be ultimately personal or impersonal appears to be left almost as a matter of taste. The best attitude might well be a willingness to embrace both aspects, and it is not that hard to recognise them as complimentary rather than exclusive of each other. It stands to reason that the ultimate reality should be beyond such mental divisions.

The real difficulty, however, is with power. Sāṁkhya, the philosophical system behind hathayoga and rajagoga, is categorical with regards to the power aspect. It radically divides the world between puruṣa, the conscious Self which is seen as passive and unmoving, and prakṛti, unconscious Nature, which contains all the energy and the action. But even in Vedanta and Buddhism, there is a pervasive tendency to see consciousness exclusively as pure awareness. In modern times the idea of consciousness as power is almost forgotten, and it is definitely not the self-evident default it deserves to be. In other words, though consciousness is much more highly valued in the Indian tradition than it is in modern science, it is still widely regarded as "causally ineffective" and In this aspect of "powerlessness" it comes close to the "epiphenomenal" conceptualisation of consciousness of modern times.

Unfortunately, this robs what is best and most true in us, that what we really are in the deepest depths of our being, the Self, the ātman, the Agni of the Veda, our highest aspiration (and perhaps even the Divine) from agency. And this in turn is, to say it mildly, problematic. If true, it would turn the manifest world — whether it is purely physical as science has it, or a mix of physical and occult elements as the older knowledge systems had it — into a causally closed system that we have to accept or reject as a whole. The possibility of a fully harmonious, participatory action is given up.

For some this might feel like a relief. passive awareness is far more easy to keep pure than dynamic action. The sense of agency tends to trigger the sense of ego quickly and potently; power corrupts. So it is tempting for the individual to escape in nirvāṇa or mokṣa. But even if we first work for the enlightenment of all sentient beings, as Mahayana Buddhism urges us to do, the pursuit of nirvāṇa and mokṣa remains an attempt at escape. Whether we escape individually or collectively, the world is left as it is. And is this what we have come for? What, as Sri Aurobindo says, happens then to "the labour of the stars"? Is there no scope for a further evolution that will finally create the perfection we dream of?

To put it simply, the real answer to the abuse of power is not its abrogation but its transformation. The real question is whether that can be done.

Supermind and the evolving soul

To understand Sri Aurobindo's positive take on this, we should not only look at his stress on consciousness as power. Though some modern scholars of Indian philosophy seem to deny this, we find this idea not only in Tantra; it is also there in the Rig Veda and the older Upanishads. And it is crucial, no doubt, but it is only half the story. We should, besides, also look at a few other areas where Sri Aurobindo's views are not shared by everyone in the tradition. The most complex and most crucial of these is the distinction Sri Aurobindo makes between an eternal, immutable, transcendent Self above, and an evolving soul deep within.

The idea that the true self can be found high above as well as deep within is common enough. It derives directly from the two most common ways in which the Self is experienced. People typically talk about their highest self or about their deepest, innermost self without making much of a distinction between the two. The idea that the innermost Self, the delegate of the jīvātman in this manifest world, is an evolving soul is, however, not necessarily part of that story and for many philosophers of yoga it is anathema. The reason is, that the existence of an evolving soul-personality is only possible if pure consciousness can have qualities as well as the power to impose these. If the pure consciousness of the Self cannot have qualities or power, as in classical Sāṁkhya, then all our individual qualities as well as our individual development must by necessity belong to the realm of māyā, prakṛti, universal Nature, the sorrowful cycle of karma and desire. The eternal Self, pure and silent, must then be conceived as picking up the whole mishmash whenever it descends into birth, only to leave it behind again at the time of death, without being in any manner effected by it. In that line of thinking, our svabhāva and svadharma can also not really be part of our eternal Self, but must be recreated for each individual life-time.

In other words, if the ultimate aim of life is dissolution, merger with the transcendent Divine, or nirvāṇa, then the personality, however well-developed it may become on the way, can be no more than a collection of karma and saṁskāranirvāṇas; it may have some relative, personal interest as long as the journey is going on, but it will have to be left behind at the end. In this view, it makes no sense to pay too much attention to it. All that is needed is the basic purification required to shift the centre of one's identity away from one's personality to the pure consciousness of the Self. In such a view, the inner Divine, the soul, the antarātman, is nothing more than a centre of pure consciousness: it is found inside, but otherwise it is just like the jīvātman above. As it is qualityless, like the paramātman, it is identical for everyone. As conception this can probably be called mainstream in the Indian tradition, and even its experience, though not common, is not unheard of.

But what if there is a beyond? What if this world and our individual existence in it can reach a level of perfection in which they can actually stand face to face with the splendours of the absolute Transcendence? Conceptually, such a genuine, divine perfection is conceivable only if there is a realistic possibility of the various aspects of the Divine manifesting down here in this evolving material world. And from an Indian "idealist" perspective this can only be, if there is already somewhere a typal plane that is fully True, in the deep sense of satyam and ṛtam. If there is somewhere an inner world which is perfectly Divine as well as fully differentiated and individualised, we could be evolving in that direction. Only when there is already somewhere a genuinely ideal typal world, can there be hope that this slowly evolving manifest world will ever reach that stage. There may be little in the outer world to indicate such a possibility, and it appears that even in their highest inner realisation few, if any, have seen such possibilities. But basing himself on his own experience and the textual support he found in the Rig Veda, Sri Aurobindo holds that there actually exists such a realm on the border between saccidānanda and our manifest creation, the almost forgotten Vedic mahas, which Sri Aurobindo called Supermind, or vijñāna (in its older, much more profound sense). If Sri Aurobindo is right, and the Supermind he found is indeed in its very essence different from the much better-known Overmind just below it, then the perspective of a gradual ongoing evolution of consciousness can give us the assurance that sooner or later our world will reach that state, which in a most profound and complete way, will finally "justify the light on Nature's face" (Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, p. 344).

Endnotes