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The Psychic Being – Some Mysteries Does the psychic being
progress always? THERE are
two kinds of progress in the psychic and they are very different. One consists
in its formation and building and organisation; for the psychic begins by being
only a little divine spark hidden in the inner person and out of this spark
comes and gradually develops an independent conscious person who has his own
will and activity. As I say, the psychic being is originally like a spark from
the divine consciousness: it grows into a conscious individuality through the
experiences of successive lives. This progress then is like the progress of the
growing child. It is a thing in formation and it remains so for a long time in most
human beings. It is not a fully individualised being there, not fully
conscious and master of itself; it needs many births, one after another, to
build itself and become fully conscious. In the end, however, there does come a
time when it is a completed personality, fully individualised, fully conscious
of itself and its destiny. When such a psychic being incarnates in a human
being, it makes a great difference. For the man is born free, so to say, he is
not bound to his circumstances, his surroundings or his origin or atavism, like
ordinary people. When he comes upon earth, he feels he has a work to do in the
world, he has a mission to fulfil. To that extent then his cycle of progress is
completed, that is to say, he has no more need to take birth in a body to make
further progress. Till then rebirth is a necessity, it is compulsory; for it is
through reincarnation i.e. by taking up a new body that he progresses, develops
and grows. It is in the physical life and in the physical body that the soul
slowly builds itself until it becomes a fully conscious being. But once it is
fully formed,
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either to take birth or not to do so at will. There then one kind of progress
comes to an end. But if the fully formed being now wishes to become an
instrument for the work of the Divine, if it chooses to be a worker upon earth
to help in the fulfilment of the cosmic purpose of the Divine, instead of going
away and resting in the psychic bliss of its own world, then he has to make a
new kind of progress, a progress towards capacity to work, to organise and
execute the work, to express and embody the will of the Divine. As long as the
world continues, as long as he chooses to work for the Divine, he will continue
to progress. But if he wishes to withdraw into the psychic world and gives up
or refuses to work for the divine Plan, then he can remain in the static state
beyond the range of progress. For, as I have said, progress exists only upon
earth in the physical world. You cannot progress everywhere. In the psychic world there is a
kind of blissful repose. You remain what and where you are without moving. Everything
upon earth progresses, has to progress. All men, without exception, even those
who have no sense of the psychic, whether they wish it or not, must progress.
The psychic progresses in them in spite of themselves and they have to follow
the curve of its growth and development. That is to say, man ascends in the
scale of life and grows, grows exactly as a child does. In the process of growth there comes a time when one
reaches the summit and one changes the direction or the plane of progress. At
the outset there is the purely physical progress, like that of the child; then
there comes the mental progress, later on the psychic progress and the spiritual
progress, so that unless progress changes it direction, when it has reached
its limit on a particular level, one has to come down the curve, that is to
say, instead of progression there will be retrogression, which means in the end
disintegration and decomposition. Precisely because in the purely physical
world there cannot be a perpetual and constant progress, there is in this
domain this curve of growth, apogee, decline and decomposition. All that does
not advance must recede. This is exactly what happens in the domain of matter.
Matter does not know how to progress indefinitely, it has not learnt it; so
after a time it is tired of progressing or growing. Given this constitution,
one cannot go beyond a limit. But
Page – 399 there is in man side by
side with his physical growth, a vital growth and a mental growth as well. The
mental especially can progress long after the body has ceased to progress. The
body does not grow; even when it is declining, the mind still can continue to
grow, to rise to higher heights. There is a mental ascension contrariwise to
the physical descent. But they who do Yoga, who become conscious of their
psychic being and are identified with it, who live with its life, never cease
to progress, they move upward till the last breath of their life; even when
they die their progress does not stop. The body is on the decline, because it
cannot keep pace with the inner march forward, it cannot transform itself and
mould itself into the rhythm of the inner consciousness. The discrepancy
increases so much between the two, that there is a snap at the end and that is
death. However, on the purely spiritual level too there is no progress. The
domain of the pure spirit means a static condition; there is no progressive
movement there, for it is beyond the field of progress, beyond all
manifestation. For when you are merged in the Spirit, you have come out of creation
and there is no question of progress, or even of any movement. When
the psychic is about to take rebirth does it choose its form beforehand? It depends. As I have told you
now, there are psychic beings that are just on the way of formation and growth,
they usually cannot choose at the beginning, they cannot choose very much. But
when they have come to a certain degree of development and consciousness, they
make a choice; generally when they are still in the body, when they have
gathered a certain amount of experience, they decide what is to be their next
field of experience. I shall give you an illustration, although somewhat
external. A psychic being, for example, needed the experience of power, authority,
command and wanted to know the reactions of these movements and also how to
turn them towards the Divine, to learn, in a word, what these things can teach.
So the soul took the body of a king (or a queen). When it had the necessary experience,
learnt what it had to learn, it gave up the body,
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longer useful. It is at that moment, when it decides to leave the body, that
the soul still in the body makes the choice of the next experience. The choice
very often takes a course of action and reaction. If the soul has experienced
and studied a particular field, its choice falls upon a contrary field on the
following occasion. Thus if the soul has had the experience of a kingly
position and worked through that to enter into a conscious relation with the
Divine, then at the moment of leaving the body that served with Power and
authority and command, it perhaps would say: "This time I shall take a
middle position, neither high nor low, where there will be no need to lead
mostly an external life, where one is neither in great luxury nor in great
misery." With that resolution it returns to the psychic world for the
necessary rest, for the assimilation of past experiences and preparation for
the future. When the time comes for return upon earth, for the descent into a
physical body, it remembers naturally the choice it had made, but from that
higher and subtler plane at that moment the material world is not seen in the
way we see it, it appears in a different form; still one can notice the
differences in the surroundings and activities. One has not the vision of the
details, but a total or global vision is there. It can choose an atmosphere, it
can choose even a particular country. It has in view a certain kind of
education, civilisation and influence, the kind of life that it wishes to lead.
Then as it comes down and looks about, it distinguishes very clearly the
different kinds of vibrations and makes its way accordingly. It aims, as it
were, at the place where to drop. But it can hit the target only approximately.
For there are one or two other factors besides which come into play. For there
is not only its own choice, from above, there must also be a receptivity from
below, an aspiration that draws to it the particular being or the particular
type of being. Usually the call is from a mother, sometimes from both the
parents. If the parent has some aspiration or receptivity, something that is
sufficiently passive and open and looking up towards something higher, in that
case, the thing appears to the psychic being as a luminous vibration which
beckons it. It is the answer to its will. It shows the place it is to go to. It
cannot fix the day of its birth. There will naturally be a period of
uncertainty, but that is not expected to go
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year. The second factor that somewhat modifies or qualifies his choice comes
from the nature of the birth itself. The soul, the conscious being,
precipitates into the inconscience, for the physical world, even human
consciousness, at its very best, is an inconscient thing when compared to the
psychic consciousness. It is as though the soul fell head down-most. That
makes it dazed and for a long time it does not know what is what. It does not
know where it is, what it is doing nor why it is there; a complete blank
possesses it. It is unable to express itself, especially as a baby, it has not
the proper amount of brain to understand or mainfest anything. Very rarely do
children show the exceptional being that they have within them. Cases do occur
indeed, but they are very few and far between. Generally it takes time for the
soul to come to its own. It wakes up but slowly from its numbness, it is only
gradually that it begins to understand that it is there for some reason and by
choice. This oblivion is occasioned by the presence of the mind and mental
education which completely shuts off the psychic consciousness. All kinds of
circumstances, happenings, experiences – external and emotional – are then
needed to strike open the doors; within, to bring the memory that one has come
from elsewhere and for a very special reason. It is the normal longer process.
But one may have the chance of meeting early enough some one who knows; then
instead of groping and fumbling through ignorance and darkness, you get the
light and the help that give you the swift and straight contact. The
psychic will and psychic development are things that are completely outside the
range of common notions. Ideas of justice and reward and punishment have no
place here at all. _any people come to me and complain: "What have I done
in my past life that I have to be under such difficult conditions now, to
suffer so much!" I always reply: "But don't you see it is a blessing
for you, the divine grace upon you? In your past life perhaps you yourself
asked for such conditions so that you may make greater progress through
them!" This way of looking at the thing may seem very novel. But truth
lies that way.
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How is
it possible for a psychic being once living the life of intelligence and creativity
to enter again into a life of stupidity and ordinariness? I
did not say it quite like that. The psychic being is not stupid. What happens
may be described in this way: for example, suppose the psychic being has had
the experience of the life of a writer. The function of the writer is to
express himself, his perceptions and observations and judgements in words; he has a certain
field, a certain range of associations and circumstances in which to live and
move. But there are other fields and ranges beyond and outside of which he has
no experience. So he may say to himself: I have lived with my head, I know
something of the intellectual reactions to life: now let me live with my heart
and experience the reactions of feeling and passion. Indeed, sometimes an overactivity of the intellect
impoverishes the capacities of the heart. So the psychic being, in order to
have this new kind of experience, abandons his intellectual heights, so to say,
and comes down to the vital plane. He is no longer a creative genius, but an
ordinary man, but with a heart enriched or enriching itself with its intense or
generous movements. (One can remember in this connection the story of
Shankaracharya who being a Sannyasi from boyhood has had no experience of love:
he entered the body of a king in order to gather this experience.) It is not
rare to see psychic beings that have reached the maximum of their growth in
certain directions, take up a very modest and ordinary life in some other new
direction or for some other purpose. One who was a king, for example, as I
already narrated once, who has had the experiences of power and authority and
domination, the imperial heights, may choose to descend to ordinary life, to
work as an obscure person without being troubled by the pomps of high
position; he may choose very bourgeois surroundings, very humdrum conditions
among humdrum men and things, to procure, so to say, a kind of incognito so
that he may work in peace and quite. Can you say it is a decline and a fall? It
is only facing life, meeting its problems from another angle, another point of
view. You must know that for consciousness, the true consciousness – the
consciousness of the psychic – glory and obscurity are the same, success and
failure are the same. What
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of consciousness. Certain conditions which to your human eye appear favourable, may in reality be
quiet unfavourable for
the growth of consciousness. With your ordinary thoughts and your ordinary
reactions you judge everything according to success and failure. But that is
the very last way of judging, for it is the most artificial, most superficial
and absolutely contrary to truth. In human life, as it is organised at
present, it is perhaps only once in a million cases, or even less than that,
that truth is given the first place; always there is an element of show mixed
up. When a man has success, much success, you may be sure there is mixed up
with it as much show.
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