-093_The Triple Cord

SUNAHSHEPA, the human creature, says the Vedic Rishi, is bound to the stake with three cords: one on the top, the second in the middle and the third below. Sunahshepa cries out to God Varuna to be freed from the triple bondage. The God is pleased and cuts the topmost cord and throws it upward, he cuts the middle cord and throws it on either side, he cuts the downmost cord and throws it downward. Thus Sunahshepa is freed through the Grace of King Varuna.

The three cords are the three limitations of being and consciousness in the normal human creature. There is a wall or barrier up in the mind which shuts out the higher levels of consciousness that are beyond the mind – the worlds of vision and revelation, of the Truth and the Vast. The middle knot shuts out the world around and abroad and limits the being to the ego, prevents the individual person from communicating with the Universal Being and Consciousness. It is the well known knot of the heart – hrdayagranthi – the crux and kernel of the egoistic consciousness. It centres the whole being on itself, limits it to itself, does not let it go out of itself to belong to the world-being. It is also the pull that prevents the being from diving down into its true personality, the psychic, and finding its union with the inner Divine. This egocentred knot has to be cut through and the thread to be scattered into the infinity of the deepest and of the widest being. The last barrier at the base of the human consciousness is the hard crust of the physical and the material being. It is closed to the regions behind, the occult sources of all external movements. This too

 * A greater force than the earthly held his limbs,

        Unwound the triple cord of mind and freed –

                                          Sri Aurobindo: Savitri 1.5

has to be pulled down and thrown into the gulfs of non-existence – primal Prakriti, out of which they are born – so that the subliminal ranges of consciousness emerge and manifest themselves.

God Varuna is invoked because he is the Lord of the Vast Consciousness, he it is that opens out the passage and leads the human being into worlds of the Vast, the Truth – Ritam, Brihat – from mortality to immortality.

In other words, as we know, the mind, the life and the body form the triple cord of the human being and hedge it within the frame of its normal, narrow, uncertain, fumbling existence; and each of these three constituent parts of human nature has to be delivered from its own particular limitations and released into the broader reality.

These threefold limitations are repeated in each of the statuses of being or consciousness. Thus the mind has a mental being, a vital being and a physical being. So the mind has mental limitations and vital limitations and also physical limitations. The mind's mental limitations are its notions and concepts, constructed ideas and fabricated comprehensions. The mind bound by its reasoning faculties, its deductive system, its syllogistic scheme, all that scaffolding has to go if the new light is to penetrate and illumine it with the new consciousness. The mind has also a vital element, when it moves according to its inspiration, as it is called sometimes, but it is only an ignorant inspiration, it is only another name for "mood," for fancy. True inspiration is not a blind mental rush but something clear and steady and yet forceful and self­poised. Again, the mind has its physical element too: the physical mind is the mind controlled by the senses, the impressions of the senses; its structure is patterned according to the impact of the physical and material objects. A clear, free physical mind embodies the pattern of the movements of the higher consciousness, not of the sense-dominated consciousness.

Even like the mind, the vital too has its threefold knots according to the three elements that constitute it. First, there is a mind in the vital, it is called mental-vital, there is a vital in the vital, it is the vital proper, and there is a physical vital. The mental-vital means the field of sentiment and feeling and emotion, the vital proper is the field of passion, the intensity 

and even ferocity of its urge, and finally, the physical vital, which is the field of outward impulsion and drive, the push towards physical act and execution. Last, the physical too has the same threefold knots, first in the mental physical, second in the vital physical and thirdly in the physical physical, that is, the physical proper. The mind in the physical is the purely brain operation, the primitive original percepts that brain-cells emanate. The vital in the physical means the record of the nerves, more or less that are sensations. Lastly, the physical physical means the most mechanical, the inertial reactions of matter.

All these triplicities have a familiar norm in the ordinary nature. And human consciousness is made up of them, in various formations and modulations.

These gradations are the various statuses of consciousness which the human being assumes in its relation with the world reality. In other words, they are the instruments through which human consciousness comes in contact with the universe. They are as it were windows upon the world through which contact is made and relation established with the objects of experience. But usually in the normal consciousness these windows are made a casement with bars and nets or even blinds over it which narrow and blur and even block the view. They are made into cords, as the Upanishad says, that blind and bind and stifle the consciousness. The cords have to be cut away, thrown out. As windows they have to be thrown wide open, open not merely outward towards the external object or reality but also inwardly to the realities, the worlds that lie within and above and beyond