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The Body and the
Psychic 1 You ask why the body has a limited receptive power. The reason is that in the physical world things must not get mixed up, they must remain somewhat stable, in shape and position. For example, if your body suddenly began to melt and flow towards another, it would be rather troublesome; you would find it disgusting if the body of your neighbour, like a fluid, were to pour into your own fluid body. It is to prevent such a mixture that a greater concentration in masses was necessary, a kind of fixity of force that separates them. Indeed it was to separate one individuality from another that this fixity was needed. And it is precisely this fixity again that prevents the body from progressing as rapidly as it could and should. As you grow up and attain your normal size and constitution, you become more and more rigid in your body. As a child you have this plasticity of growth. Children change continually, they change visibly. This plasticity, this growth and development continue, so long as you remain young. But beyond, say, forty, people generally feel that they have reached their goal, they sit down to gather the fruits of their labour; they gradually become dry as dust, hard like old wood, and even like stone in the end. The body then not being able to adapt itself to the movement of the inner change, gets fossilised and crumbles, which means death. After Death there is
then no further progress? That depends. There is a kind of progress
sometimes. There are, for example, writers, musicians, artists, people who
lived Page – 392 on a high
mental level, who feel that they have yet something to do upon earth, they did
not finish their work, fulfil their mission, reach the goal they set before
themselves. So they wish to remain in the earth's atmosphere as much as possible,
retain as much cohesion of their being as needed and seek to manifest
themselves and progress through other living human forms. I have seen many such
cases: I shall tell you the very interesting case of a musician, a pianist, a
pianist of a very high order; he had hands that had become something marvellous,
full of skill, accuracy, precision, force, swiftness; it was truly remarkable.
The man died comparatively young and with the feeling that had he lived he
would have gone on advancing in his musical self-expression. Such was the
intensity of his aspiration that his subtle hands retained their form without
getting dissolved and wherever there was someone passive and receptive and at
the same time a good musician the hands of the dead man would enter into the
living hands that played. In the
case that I saw the man used to play well enough normally but quite in the
ordinary way; he became, however, as he continued to play all on a sudden not
only a virtuoso, but a marvellous artist; it was the hands of the other person
who made use of him. The same thing may happen with regard to a painter; in his
case too, the hands are the instrument. For certain writers also a like thing
may happen; but here it is the brain of the dead man that retains its formation
and it is this that enters the brain of the living writer which must be
receptive enough to allow the formation in all its precision. I have seen a
writer who was nothing extraordinary in his normal capacity, but used to write
things much more beautiful in those moments than he was capable of doing or was doing usually. I know the case
of a musical composer, not executor like the one I referred to before, which
was particularly remarkable. In the
case of the composer, like the writer, it is the brain that serves him; for the
executor the hands are the chief instrument. Beethoven, Bach, Cesar Franck were
great composers, although the last one was an executor also. The composition of
music is a cerebral activity. Now the brain of a great musician used to enter
in contact with that of the composer and made him compose marvellous pieces.
The man was writing a musical opera. You must remember Page – 393 what a complicated thing an opera music is. It is a complex whole in which roles are distributed to a very large number of performers each playing differently on different instruments and they must all of them together and severally express the idea and the theme the composer has in his mind. Now, this man I am speaking of, when he sat down with the blank paper in front, used to receive the musical formation in his brain and wrote down continuously as if he was recording something ready-made placed before him. I saw him filling up a whole page from top to bottom with all the details of orchestration. He had no need to hear any instrument, he did it all on paper; and the distribution was perfect. He himself was not very unconscious, he used to feel that something entered into him and helped him to bring out the music. You
must note here that when I speak of a formation entering into a living person,
the formation does not mean the man himself who is dead, that is to say, his
soul or psychic being. I say that it is only a special faculty which continues
to remain in the earth atmosphere, even after the death of the man to whom the
faculty belonged: it was so well developed, well formed that it continues to
retain its independent identity. The soul, the true being of the man is no
longer there; I have told you often that after death it goes away as soon as
possible to the psychic world, its own world, for rest, assimilation and
preparation. Not that it cannot happen otherwise. A soul incarnating as a great
musician may incarnate again in or as a great musician, although I said in
another connection that a soul usually prefers to vary, even to contrast and
contradict its incarnations with each other. Take for example, the great
violinist, Isaie; he was a Belgian and the most marvellous violinist of his
century. I knew him and I am sure he was an incarnation, at least, an
emanation, of the soul that was the great Beethoven. It may not have been the
whole psychic being that so reincarnated, but the soul in its musical capacity.
He had the same appearance, the same head. When I saw him first appearing on
the stage I was greatly surprised, I said to myself, he looks so like
Beethoven, the very portrait of that great genius. And then he stood, the bow
poised, one stroke and there were in it three or four notes only, but three or
four supreme notes, full of power, greatness and grandeur; Page – 394 the entire hall was charged with an atmosphere marvellous and unique. I could recognise very well the musical genius of Beethoven behind. It may be possible here too the soul of Beethoven in its entirety-the whole psychic being-was not present; the central psychic might have been elsewhere gathering more modest, commonplace. experiences, as a shoemaker, for example. But what was left and what manifested itself was something very characteristic of the great musician. He had disciplined his mental and vital being and even his physical being in view of his musical capacity and this formation remained firm and sought to reincarnate. The musical being was originally organised and fashioned around the psychic consciousness and therefore it acquired its peculiar power and its force of persistence, almost an immortality. Such formations, though not themselves the psychic being, have a psychic quality, are independent beings, possess their own life and seek their fulfilment by manifesting and incarnating themselves whenever the occasion presents itself. Can a Psychic Being
take two bodies at the same time? The
matter is not so simple. I have told you often that the psychic being is the
result of an evolution, that is to say, it is the expression of the divine
consciousness that has entered and spread itself into Matter and slowly raises
Matter and develops it so that it may return to the Divine. The psychic being
is formed progressively by the divine centre through many lives or
incarnations. There comes a time when it attains a kind of perfection, the
perfection of its growth and formation. It has then often an aspiration towards
greater realisation, a further progress to manifiest better or further the Divine. As the result of this
pull, it generally draws towards itself a being of a higher order, from a
higher plane, from the Overmind, as Sri Aurobindo calls it, a being of
involution who incarnates in the psychic being. These overmental entities are
termed gods and divinities by men. Now when the fusion takes place, of a god
into a psychic being, the latter naturally increases in stature and partakes of
the nature of the god and acquires also the capacity to produce emanations;
that is to say it throws out of itself a part which possesses an independent
existence and can Page – 395 incarnate in others. In this way there may be not only two but several emanations or projections of the same original being. In other words, there may be a single psycho-divine origin but many personalities coming out of it. That is how it happens sometimes that different people feel a sort of affinity and even identity, and with reason, because they carry within them the same deity, out of which they, that is, their psychic being came. It is not the same thing as the doubling of the personality where in throwing oneself out of oneself one loses a portion, as when you cut a body into two: there are only two halves. Here the projection is a whole and independent personality. If you emanate a being out of you, you remain whole and entire without losing anything of yourself and the emanation too is a being whole and entire living its independent life. 2 What is the work of the
Psychic? What is its function? The
Psychic is like the wire between the generator and the lamp. What is the
generator and what is the lamp, or rather, who is the generator and who the
lamp? The Divine is the generator and the body, the visible being, is the lamp.
The function then of the Psychic is to connect the two. In other words, if
there were no Psychic in Matter, Matter could not come in direct contact with
the Divine. All human beings, including yourself, all carry the Divine within
you, you have only to enter within you to find Him. It is a unique speciality of the human
being, rather of all embodied beings living upon earth. In the human being, the
psychic becomes more conscious and formed; more conscious and therefore also
more free, it is individualised. You should note that it is a speciality of the earth alone. It is the
direct infusion of a purifying and redeeming agent into the most obscure and
unconscious Matter to awaken it by degrees towards the divine consciousness,
the divine presence, to the Divine Himself. It is the psychic presence that
makes of man an exceptional being. Perhaps it is not good to tell it to him too
often, for as it is he is already puffed up and thinks very highly of himself
and there is no need to
Page – 396 encourage him in that direction. Still it is a fact: so much so that beings from other worlds, worlds of what are known as demi-gods or even gods, beings from what Sri Aurobindo calls the Overmind, are eager to take a physical body upon earth so that they may experience the Psychic, as they do not possess it. These beings have very many qualities which men have not, but they lack this divine presence which is quite an exceptional thing belonging to the earth alone. All the inhabitants of the higher worlds – the Higher Mind, the Overmind and other domains – do not have the psychic being. Naturally, the beings of the vital worlds have not got it either. But these vital beings do not regret, for they do not want to have it. There are, however, a few exceptional beings on this level who wish to be converted and therefore desire a physical body; but the rest do not want, they are bound to the law of their being and cannot repudiate it. So
I say and we are bound to admit that it is an exceptional virtue in the human
being to bear the psychic in him. But to tell the truth, he does not seem to
have profited much by it. He does not look like considering his virtue as
something very desirable, from the manner he has been treating this presence.
He prefers to it his mental ideals, he prefers to it his vital demands and he
prefers to it his physical habits. I do not know how many of you have read the
Bible. But there is a story that I used to like always. There were two
brothers, Esau and Jacob. Esau had gone out hunting and felt tired and hungry.
He came back home and found his brother preparing a dish. He asked Jacob to
feed him. Jacob said he would give him food if he, Esau, sold his birthright to
him. Esau said, of what use is the birthright to me now, and sold it to his
brother. You understand the significance? You can of course take it quite in
the superficial way. But I took it differently. The birthright is the right to
be the son of God. And Esau was quite ready to give up his divine right for a
mess of pottage. It is an old story, but it is eternally true. Page – 397
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