|
Expect nothing from death," says Mother, "life is your salvation. It is in life that you must transform yourself. It is on earth that you progress and on earth that you realize. It is in the body that you win the Victory." (On the Dhammapada.) "Nor let worldly prudence whisper too closely in thy ear," says Sri Aurobindo, "for it is the hour of the unexpected." (The Hour of God, XVII.I.) Pondicherry, 9 December 1971 I understand by the term “soul“ of a person that immortal element in us which survives the death of the physical body, in order that it incarnates itself once more in a physical body. In the course of an individual consciousness evolution, around the soul develops a “psychic being” with whose “outer periphery” the “inner being” . We have to differentiate the soul from the “psyche“ likewise the “person in the foreground” , the “outer being”. The problem in using this term “Psyche” is that it is translated into German with the term “Seele” (soul) although it basically differs from the actual souls of people as I have described it above. |
Inside the psyche we can distinguish between two parts of being the “Mind“ and the “Vital“. Unfortunately we are concerned here in the term “Mind” with characteristics which in the German language are partly attributed to the “spirit” (here “higher Mind”). Sri Aurobindo in ‘Letters on Yoga’, Volume 1 : „The word “mind’ includes in the everyday use of language without differentiation the entire consciousness because human beings are mind beings and everything they experience passes through their mind; but here the word “Mind” is used in order to characterize that part of nature which has to do with understanding and rationality, with ideas, perceptions of Mind or of thought, with true stirrings of the Mind and structuring, with displaying the Mind, the will of the Mind etc. which are all parts of his rational comprehension. The Vital has to be precisely differentiated from the Mind even when it contains a Mind element; the Vital is the nature of life which is composed of yearnings, feelings, excitements, passions, impulses for action, the yearning-will and the reactions which are in the “vital souls” of people, and as well consists of all those games of the possessive and other related instincts such as anger, fear, greed, lust etc, all of which belong to this part of human nature. The Mind and the Vital are mixed with each other on the surface of consciousness but they are in themselves very different forces; as soon as one is able to penetrate behind the routine surface consciousness, one recognizes them as separate, one discovers their differences. “ |