The Emergence of Integral Personality

 

The Emergence of Surface Personality

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“He at length must cast from him his surface soul

And be the ungarbed entity within:”

Savitri-11

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“Only a moment’s fine release it gave;

A careless hour was spent in a slight bliss.

Our spirit tires of being’s surfaces,

Transcended is the splendour of the form;

It (Spirit) turns to hidden powers and deeper states. ” 

Savitri-115 

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“It saw an image of the external world

And saw its surface self, but knew no more.” 

Savitri-150

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“In men I (Satyavan) met strange portions of a Self

That sought for fragments and in fragments lived:

Each lived in himself and for himself alone

And with the rest joined only fleeting ties;

Each passioned over his surface joy and grief, 

Nor saw the Eternal in his secret house.”

Savitri-405

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“On a dim ocean of subconscient life

A formless surface consciousness awoke:

A stream of thoughts and feelings came and went,

A foam of memories hardened and became

A bright crust of habitual sense and thought,

A seat of living personality

And recurrent habits mimicked permanence.” 

Savitri-477-478

 

            Impersonality is the source of all personality. Surface personality¹ is the outcome of energy created from Inconscient plane. It is born by the pressure of the subtle mental being that secretly thinks and perceives in us, the subtle vital being that secretly feels, enjoys and acts upon life through us, the subtle-physical being that secretly receives, thrills and responds to the contacts of things through our body and its organs and by the upthrow from the depth of Subconscient and Inconscient sheaths, the surface personality is much exteriorized, distorted, confused, mutilated and vulgarized. So the surface Personality is only a temporary mental, vital, physical formation in which powers, influences and motives are amalgamated and if we little concentrate ourselves on it then we can find its outer persistent and mobile formations that springs from all our thoughts and emotions, sources and motives of all our actions and operative forces from which surface personality of this life is constructed. ‘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.’³⁴

            

           So in this superficial man, his dynamic force of consciousness, tapas, is concentrated on the surface in a certain way of limited and superficial working, ignorant of all the vast domain that are behind the surface, forms the basis of his personality. For a Spiritual man, reception of intimations from inner being by surface Nature is not sufficient transformation but he must break down the wall separating the inner being from the outer life. One must cease to be surface personality and become the inner Person. ‘It is possible by bringing the real soul to the surface to replace the egoistic standards of pleasure and pain by an equal, all-embracing personal-impersonal delight.’³⁶ The outer Nature has to go through difficult change of externalised and accustomed poise of existence and travel long way from surface to the depth in quieting and purifying the untransformed Nature and calling down the Transcendent force. Thus he transcends the smallness, obscurity and inertness of the body, exceeds the limited force and normal aspiration of life and surpasses the limited light and knowledge of the surface mind.  

 

            “But, for this change to arrive at its widest totality and profound completeness, the consciousness has to shift its centre and its static and dynamic position from the surface to the inner being; it is there that we mustfind the foundation for our thought, life and action. For to stand outside on our surface and to receive from the inner being and follow its intimations is not a sufficient transformation; one must cease to be the surface personality and become the inner Person, the Purusha. But this is difficult, first because the outer nature opposes the movement and clings to its normal accustomed poise and externalised way of existence and, in addition, because there is a long way from the surface to the depths in which the psychic entity is veiled from us, and this intervening space is filled with a subliminal nature and nature-movements which are not by any means all of them favourable to the completion of the inward movement. The outer nature has to undergo a change of poise,a quieting, a purification and fine mutation of its substance and energy by which the many obstacles in it rarefy, drop away or otherwise disappear; it then becomes possible to pass through to the depths of our being and from the depths so reached a new consciousness can be formed, both behind the exterior self and in it, joining the depths to the surface. There must grow up within us or there must manifest a consciousness more and more open to the deeper and the higher being, more and more laid bare to the cosmic Self and Power and to what comes down from the Transcendence, turned to a higher Peace, permeable to a greater light, force and ecstasy, a consciousness that exceeds the small personality and surpasses the limited light and experience of the surface mind, the limited force and aspiration of the normal life consciousness, the obscure and limited responsiveness of the body.”³²

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The Emergence of Physical Personality

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“And carves a personality out of mud,

The sorrow by which Nature’s hunger is fed,

The oestrus which creates with fire of pain,

The fate that punishes virtue with defeat,

The tragedy that destroys long happiness,

The weeping of Love, the quarrel of the Gods,

Ceased in a truth which lives in its own light.”

Savitri-33

 

           Physical personality is attached to earth which clings to soil and has a certain degree of material poise, stability and balance. He is concerned with birth, food, money getting, procreation of a family, comfort, satisfaction of common impulses, short lived desires, the maintenance of the life and the body, death of this mutable body and general expectation of worse things awaiting him in the world. This tamasic personality in its action of principle is of two kinds, (1) inertia of force with its obscurity which drives in a mechanical routine round of energy and (2) inertia of knowledge which does not possess the idea of its own energy but is guided by an idea which seem external to it or concealed from active awareness. This tamasic energy is dominated by the physical mind which is full of dull inertia, obscure in its reception, unwilling to change, recalcitrant to pressure of new Spiritual force, conservative, cowardice, sloth, lax subjection to small and inferior motives and clings to fixed type of limited repetitive established narrow rigid knowledge. Tamas brings into our emotional nature indifference, insensibility to beauty, dull aesthesis and all that makes man heavy, coarse and vulgar. 

 

            By the pressure of true physical being the outer physical sheath purifies, overcomes the ego in the physical, a quietude and stillness is imposed on the body and can be efficient instrument of the Soul in the body, annamaya Purusha, and he can arrive at the idea of a finer, more beautiful and perfect physical life¹⁴ and extend the same in the collective existence. In a Spiritual man tamasic personality is transformed into Divine calm, a perfect power of Shakti and capacity of great action in active silence.

 

 

The Emergence of Vital Personality

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“Here mingling in man’s heart their tones and hues

Have woven his being’s mutable design,

His life a forward-rippling stream in Time,

His nature’s constant fixed mobility,

His soul a moving picture’s changeful film,

His cosmos-chaos of personality.”

Savitri-122

 

            The vital personality is more attached to air than earth and vital man is concerned with self-affirmation, self-aggrandisement, life-enlargement¹⁶, satisfaction of ambition, passion and desire. This surface vital personality¹⁵ is the dominance of the ignorant vital being which is the principal active source of all discord and disharmony, more turbulent, chaotic and unregulated, a cause of inner and outer disturbance of life, the fanatic or sectarian mind, selfishness, a mainspring of wrong-doing and evil. This rajasic personality is dominated by the vital mind and is of two kinds: (1) one kind is defensive with violence and passion, assertive of its mental individuality and all that is in agreement with it, preferred by its own will, adapted to its outlook, but aggressive against all that is contrary to its vital ego-structure or unacceptable  to its personal intellectuality; (2) the other kind is enthusiastic for new things, passionate, kinetic, insistent, creative, impetuous, exaggerating action of the reason and aesthesis, often mobile beyond measure, inconstant, governed in its idea not by truth and light but by the enthusiasm of intellectual battle, restless movement and ambitious adventure. 

           

            By the pressure true vital being, pranamaya Purusha, the outer life personality purifies, overcomes the vital ego, becomes the instrument of the Soul in the vital and can develop higher vital faculties of delight, love, aesthesis, beauty in the maintenance of whole life and a strong passion for truth, beauty and good. Then it discovers a secret delight that pervades the whole existence and is extended as a delight in good as well as in evil, a delight in truth as well as in falsehood, a delight in life as well as in death, a delight in pleasure as well as in pain, a delight in one’s own suffering and the suffering of others and also in one’s own and others joy, happiness and good. A strong liberated vital personality is always balanced, forceful man of action, powerful warrior, successful statesman and arrives at a strong self-affirmation in life and action. In the evolutionary ascent of Nature, this vital personality is identified as the second step of harmonised formulation of life. In a Spiritual man this rajasic personality is transformed into self-effecting initiating sheer Will, perfect power of Being, Shakti, capable of immense, composed and blissful action.

 

 

The Emergence of Mental Personality

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“An instrument-personality was born,

And a restricted clamped intelligence

Consented to confine in narrow bounds

Its seeking; it tied the thought to visible things,

Prohibiting the adventure of the Unseen

And the soul’s tread through unknown infinities.” 

 

Savitri-148

 

            With the change of Time and Space the Mental personality³ constantly modifies which is the form of our apparent or superficial self. It can be deformed at any moment and be the cause of falsification of knowledge, an unconscious or half willful self-deception and a refusal and revolt towards acceptance of true knowledge. Sattwic personality is in nature eager to acquire new knowledge, open towards new possibility of Spirit, careful to consider, verify, balance, adopt and adjust to its limited view of truth, receives all in limited harmony and in a restricted intellectual structure; it receives limited mental light and is unable to enlarge itself so as to receive equally all truth and all knowledge. This Sattwic person has a mental ego subjected to limitation of mental consciousness and is divided into two parts of mutable self-experience, (1) its subjective experience of the ever-modified mental states of its personality bound within the movements of three gunas of tamas, rajas and sattwa; the same mind can be unreceptive and obscure in one direction, kinetic, possessive, hasty and ill balanced in another and yet in another open, plastic and harmonic, and (2) its objective experience of the ever-changing world environment which seems partly or wholly effects in building his mental personality.¹⁸ There is a constant modifying change of Time-points and Space-fields which results in constant modification of his personality. ‘It is the mind’s ignorance of this true Person in us, its confusion of person with our experience of ego and limited personality, the misleading phenomenon of the emergence of the limited consciousness and personality in an inconscient existence that have made us create an opposition between these two aspects (personal and impersonal) of the Reality, but in truth there is no opposition.’³⁷ And also intellect cannot reconcile two seemingly opposite principles of Matter and Spirit.⁴⁰

 

            “Man is a mental being and the mind is the leader of his life and body; but this is a leader who is much led by his followers and has sometimes no other will than what they impose on him. Mind in spite of its power is often impotent before the inconscient and Subconscient which obscure its clarity and carry it away on the tide of instinct or impulse; in spite of its clarity it is fooled by vital and emotional suggestions into giving sanction to ignorance and error, to wrong thought and to wrong action, or it is obliged to look on while the nature follows what it knows to be wrong, dangerous or evil. Even when it is strong and clear and dominant, Mind though it imposes a certain, a considerable mentalised harmony, cannot integrate the whole being and nature. These harmonisations by an inferior control are, besides, inconclusive, because it is one part of the nature which dominates and fulfils itself while the others are coerced and denied their fullness. They can be steps on the way, but not final; therefore in most men there is no such sole dominance and effected partial harmony, but only a predominance and for the rest an unstable equilibrium of personality of half formed, half in formation, sometimes a disequilibrium or unbalance due to the lack of a central government or the disturbance of a formerly achieved partial poise.’¹⁹

 

            By the pressure of true mental being, Manomaya Purusha, an individual can become strong liberated mental personality, the accomplished type of Sattwic man⁴³ is philosopher, saint and sage and he transcends the limitation of mind and arrives at the universal and transcendent Consciousness. In Spiritual man, this Sattwic personality of modified mental light is transformed into self-existent light of the Divine Being and God’s touch is transformed into His constant embrace. His mind initially develops into the mind of the sage and the abstraction of the mind is later transformed into direct Spiritual experience. Thus a Spiritual sage emerges within him whose mind becomes pure, large, tranquil, impersonal and universal.   

 

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References

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1: “For a larger mental being is there within us, a larger inner vital being, even a larger inner subtle-physical being other than our surface body-consciousness, and by entering into this or becoming it, identifying ourselves with it, we can observe the springs of our thoughts and feelings, the sources and motives of our action, the operative energies that build up our surface personality. For we discover and can know the inner being that secretly thinks and perceives in us, the vital being that secretly feels and acts upon life through us, the subtle-physical being that secretly receives and responds to the contacts of things through our body and its organs. Our surface thought, feeling, emotion is a complexity and confusion of impulsions from within and impacts from outside us; our reason, our organizing intelligence can impose on it only an imperfect order: but there within we find the separate sources of our mental, our vital and our physical energisms and can see clearly the pure operations, the distinct powers, the composing elements of each and their interplay in a clear light of self-vision.” CWSA-21/The Life Divine/p-552-53, 

 

2: “In the surface consciousness knowledge represents itself as a truth seen from outside, thrown on us from the object, or as a response to its touch on the sense, a perceptive reproduction of its objective actuality.” CWSA-21/The Life Divine/p-560, 

 

3: “In terms of the Sankhya psychology we can distinguish three types of mental individuality, -- (1) that which is governed by the principle of obscurity and inertia, first-born of the Inconscience, tamasic; (2) that which is governed by a force of passion and activity, kinetic, rajasic; (3) that which is cast in the mould of the Sattwic principle of light, harmony, balance. (1) The tamasic intelligence has its seat in the physical mind: it is inert to ideas, --except to those which it receives inertly, blindly, passively from a recognised source or authority, --obscure in their reception, unwilling to enlarge itself, recalcitrant to new stimulus, conservative and immobile; it clings to its received structure of knowledge and its one power is repetitive practicality, but it is a power limited by the accustomed, the obvious, the established and familiar and already secure; it thrusts away all that is new and likely to disturb it. (2) The rajasic intelligence has its main seat in the vital mind and is of two kinds: (2a) one kind is defensive with violence and passion, assertive of its mental individuality and all that is in agreement with it, preferred by its volition, adapted to its outlook, but aggressive against all that is contrary to its mental ego-structure or unacceptable  to its personal intellectuality; (2b) the other kind is enthusiastic for new things, passionate, insistent, impetuous, often mobile beyond measure, inconstant and ever restless, governed in its idea not by truth and light but by the zest of intellectual battle and movement and adventure. (3) The sattwic intelligence is eager for knowledge, as open as it can be to it, careful to consider and verify and balance, to adjust and adapt to its view whatever confirms itself as truth, receiving all in a harmonious intellectual structure: but, because its light is limited, as all mental light must be, it is unable to enlarge itself so as to receive equally all truth and all knowledge; it has a mental ego, even an enlightened one, and is determined by it in its observation, judgment, reasoning mental choice and preference. In most men there is a predominance of one of these qualities but also a mixture; the same mind can be open and plastic and harmonic in one direction, kinetic and vital, hasty and prejudiced and ill-balanced in another, in yet another obscure and unreceptive. This limitation by personality, this defence of personality and refusal to receive what is unassimilable, is necessary for the individual being because in its evolution, at the stage reached, it has a certain self-expression, a certain type of experience and use of experience which must, for the mind and life at least, govern nature; that for the moment is its law of being, its dharma. This limitation of mind-consciousnessby personality and of truth of mental temperament and preference must be the rule of our nature so long as the individual has not reached universality, is not yet preparing for mind-transcendence. But it is evident that this condition is inevitably a source of error and can at any moment be the cause of a falsification of knowledge, an unconscious or half-willful self-deception, a refusal to admit true knowledge, a readiness to assert acceptable wrong knowledge as true knowledge.” CWSA-21/The Life Divine/p-642-43,

 

4: “Impersonality is in its source something fundamental and universal; it is an existence, a force, a consciousness that takes on various shapes of its being and energy; each such shape of energy, quality, power or force, though still in itself general, impersonal and universal, is taken by the individual being as material for building of his personality. Thus impersonality is in the original undifferentiated truth of things the pure substance of nature of the Being, the Person; in the dynamic truth of things it differentiates its powers and lends them to constitute by their variations the manifestation of personality. Love is the nature of the lover, courage the nature of the warrior; love and courage are impersonal and universal forces or formulations of the cosmic Force, they are the spirit’s powers of its universal being and nature. The Person is the Being supporting what is thus impersonal, holding it in himself as his, his nature of self; he is that which is the lover and warrior. What we call the personality of the Person is his expression in nature-status and nature-action, --he himself being in his self-existence, originally and ultimately, much more than that; it is the form of himself that he puts forth as his manifested already developed natural being or self in nature.” CWSA-22/The Life Divine/p-1028-29,

 

5: “The part of us that we have characterized as intraconscient and circumconscient (Refer The Life Divine-851 where subliminal is Intraconscient)  is a still more potent and much more valuable element in the constitution of our being. It includes the large action of an inner intelligence and inner sense-mind, of an inner vital, even of an inner subtle-physical being which upholds and embraces our waking consciousness, which is not brought to the front, which is subliminal, in the modern phrase. But when we can enter and explore this hidden self, we find that our waking sense and intelligence are for the most part a selection from what we secretly are or can be, an exteriorized and much mutilated and vulgarized edition of our real, our hidden being or an upthrow from its depths. Our surface being has been formed with this subliminal help by an evolution out of the Inconscient for the utility of our present mental and physical life on earth; this that is behind is a formation mediating between the Inconscient and the larger planes of Life and Mind which have been created by involutionary descent and whose pressure has helped to bring about the evolution of mind and life in Matter. Our surface responses to physical existence have at their back the support of an activity in these veiled parts, are often responses from them modified by a surface mental rendering. But also that large part of our mentality and vitality which is not a response to the outside world but lives for itself or throws itself out on material existence to use and possess it, our personality, is the outcome, the amalgamated formulation of powers, influences, motives proceeding from this potent intraconscient secrecy.” CWSA-22/The Life Divine/p-763-64, 

 

6: “We can get some glimpse of what this means, to what it amounts in action, when we look at the nature of exclusive concentration in mental man, in our own consciousness. First of all, we must note that what we mean ordinarily by the man is not the inner self, but only a sum of apparent continuous movement of consciousnessand energy in past, present and future to which we give this name. It is this that in appearance does all works of the man, thinks all his thoughts, feels all his emotions. This energy is a movement of Consciousness-Force concentrated on a temporal stream of inward and outward workings. But we know that behind this stream of energy there is a whole sea of consciousness which is aware of the stream, but of which the stream is unaware; for this sum of surface energy is a selection, an outcome from all the rest that is invisible. That sea is the subliminal self, the superconscient, the subconscient, the intraconscient and circumconscient being, and holding it all together the soul, the psychic entity. The stream is the natural, the superficial man. In this superficial manTapas, the being’s dynamic force of consciousness, is concentrated on the surface in a certain mass of superficial workings; all the rest of itself it has put behind and may be vaguely aware of it there in the unformulated back of its conscious existence, but is not aware of it in this superficial absorbed movement in front. It is not precisely, at any rate in that back or in the depths, ignorant of itself in any essential sense of the word, but for the purposes of its superficial movement and within that movement only it is oblivious of its real, its greater self, by absorption, by exclusive concentration on what it is superficially doing. Yet it is really the hidden sea and not the superficial stream which is doing all the action: it is the sea that is the source of this movement, not the conscious wave, absorbed in its movement, living in that, seeing nothing else but that, may think about the matter. And that sea, the real self, the integral conscious being, the integral force of being, is not ignorant; even the wave is not essentially ignorant, --for it contains within itself all the consciousness it has forgotten but for that it could not act or endure at all, --but it is self-oblivious, absorbed in its own movement, too absorbed to note anything else than the movement while that continues to preoccupy it. A limited practical self-oblivion, not an essential and binding self-ignorance, is the nature of this exclusive concentration which is yet the root of that which works as the Ignorance.” CWSA-21/The Life Divine/p-605-606, 

 

7: “Therefore in his superficial consciousness man is to himself dynamically, the man of the moment, not the man of the past who once was but is no longer in existence, nor the man of the future who is not yet in being; it is by memory that he links himself with the one, by anticipation with the other: a continuous ego-sense runs through the three times, but this is a centralising mental construction, not an essential or an extended existence containing what was, is and will be. An intuition of self is behind it, but that is an underlying identity, unaffected by the changes of his personality; in his surface formation of being he is not that but what he is at the moment. Yet all the time this existence in the moment is not the real or the whole truth of his being, but only a practical or pragmatic truth for the purposes of the superficial movement of his life and within its limits. It is a truth, not an unreality, but a truth only in its positive part; in its negative parts it is an ignorance, and this negative ignorance limits and often distorts even the practical truth, so that the conscious life of man proceeds according to an ignorance, a partial, a half-true half-false knowledge, not according to the real truth of himself of which he is oblivious. Yet because his real self is the true determinator and governs all secretly from behind, it is after all a knowledge behind which really determines the formed course of his existence; the superficial ignorance erects a necessary limiting outline and supplies the factors by which the outward colour and turn needed for his present human life and his present moment are given to his consciousness and his action. In the same way and for the same reason man identifies himself solely with the name and form he wears in his present existence; he is ignorant of his past before birth even as of his future after death. Yet all that he forgets is contained, present and effective, in the all-retaining integral consciousness within him.” CWSA-21/The Life Divine/p-606-07,

 

8: “But the first of these two movements, (the knowledge by direct contact and knowledge by identity), the awakening to our inner realities, imposes itself as the prior necessity because it is by this inward self-finding that the second –the cosmic self-finding –can become entirely possible: we have to go into our inner being and learn to live in it and from it; the outer mind and life and body must become for us only an antechamber. All that we are on the outside is indeed conditioned by what is within, occult, in our inner depths and recesses; it is thence that come the secret initiatives, the self-effective formations; our inspirations, our intuitions, our life motives, our mind’s preferences, our will’s selections are actuated from there, --in so far as they are not shaped or influenced by an insistence, equally hidden, of a surge of cosmic impacts: but the use we make of these emergent powers and these influences is conditioned, largely determined and, above all, very much limited by our outermost nature. It is then the knowledge of this inner initiating self coupled with the accurate perception of the outer instrumental self and the part played by both of them in our building that we have to discover.” CWSA-21/The Life Divine/p-551-52, 

 

9: “But because the burden which is being laid on mankind is too great for the present littleness of the human personality and its petty mind and small life-instincts, because it cannot operate the needed change, because it is using this new apparatus and organisation to serve the old infraspiritual and infrarational life-self of humanity, the destiny of the race seems to be heading dangerously, as if impatiently and in spite of itself, under the drive of the vital ego seized by colossal forces which are on the same scale as the huge mechanical organisation of life and scientific knowledge which it has evolved, a scale too large for its reason and will to handle, into a prolonged confusion and perilous crisis and darkness of violent shifting incertitude. Even if this turns out to be a passing phase or appearance and a tolerable structural accommodation is found which will enable mankind to proceed less catastrophically on its uncertain journey, this can only a respite. For the problem is fundamental and in putting it evolutionary Nature in man is confronting herself with a critical choice which must one day be solved in the true sense if the race is to arrive or even to survive. The evolutionary nisus (effort) is pushing towards a development of the cosmic Force in terrestrial life which needs a larger mental and vital being to support it, a wider mind, a greater wider more conscious unanimised Life-Soul, Anima, and that again needs an unveiling of the supporting Soul and spiritual Self within to maintain it.” CWSA-22/The Life Divine/p-1092-93, 

 

10: “A gnostic Supernature transcends all the values of our normal ignorant Nature; our standards and values are created by ignorance and therefore cannot determine the life of Super- nature. At the same time our presentnature is a derivation from Supernature and is not a pure ignorance but a half-knowledge; it is therefore reasonable to suppose that whatever spiritual truth there is in or behind its standards and values will reappear in the higher life, not as standards, but as elements transformed, uplifted out of the ignorance and raised into the true harmonyof a more luminous existence. As the universalized spiritual individual sheds the limited personality, the ego, as he rises beyond mind to a completer knowledge in Supernature, the conflicting ideals of the mind must fall away from him, but what is true behind them will remain in the life of Supernature. The gnostic consciousness is a consciousness in which all contradictions are cancelled or fused into each other in a higher light of seeing andbeing, in a unified self-knowledge and world-knowledge. The gnostic being will not accept the mind’s idealsand standards; he will not be moved to live for himself, for his ego, or for humanity or for others or for thecommunity or for the State; for he will be aware of something greater than these half-truths, of the Divine Reality, and it is for that he will live, for its will in himself and in all, in a spirit of large universality, in the light of the will of the Transcendence. For the same reason there can be no conflict between self-affirmation and altruism in the gnostic life, for the self of the gnostic being is one with the self of all, — no conflict between the ideal of individualism and the collective ideal, for both are terms of a greater Reality and only in so far as either expresses the Reality or their fulfilment serves the will of the Reality, can they have a value for his spirit. But at the same time what is true in the mental ideals and dimly figured in them will be fulfilled in his existence; forwhile his consciousness exceeds the human values so that he cannot substitute mankind or the community or the State or others or himself for God, the affirmation of the Divine in himself and a sense of the Divine in others and the sense of oneness with humanity, with all other beings, with all the world because of the Divine inthem and a lead towards a greater and better affirmation of the growing Reality in them will be part of his lifeaction. But what he shall do will be decided by the Truth of the Knowledge and Will in him, a total and infinite Truth that is not bound by any single mental law or standard but acts with freedom in the whole reality, withrespect for each truth in its place and with a clear knowledge of the forces at work and the intention in the manifesting Divine Nisus at each step of cosmic evolution and in each event and circumstance.” CWSA-22/The Life Divine/p-1101-02,

 

11: “But what we thus call personality is only a formation of superficial consciousness… our personality, is the outcome, the amalgamated formulations of powers, influences, motives proceeding from this potent intraconscient secrecy… Personality is only a temporary mental, vital, physical formation which the being, the real Person, the psychic entity, puts forward on the surface, --it is not the self in its abiding reality…” CWSA-21/The Life Divine/p-367-68, 764, 848,

 

12: CWSA-23/The Synthesis of Yoga/p-127-128,

 

13: “A perfect equality not only of the self, but in the nature is a condition of the Yoga of self perfection. The first obvious step to it will be the conquest of our emotional and vital being, for here are the sources of greatest trouble, the most rampant forces of inequality and subjection, the most insistent claim of our imperfection. The equality of these parts of our nature comes by purification and freedom…All that comes to it from the world with menace or with solicitation, it will refer to the higher principles, to a reason and heart, in touch with or changed by the light and calm joy of the spirit… There is no question here of an ascetic killing of the life-impulse and its native utilities and functions; not its killing is demanded, but its transformation.” CWSA/24/The Synthesis of Yoga/p-702-703,

 

14: “In some human beings it is the physical Purusha, the being of the body, who dominates the mind, will and action; there is then created the physical man mainly occupied with his corporeal life and habitual needs, impulses, life habits, mind habits, body habits, looking very little or not at all beyond that, subordinating and restricting all his other tendencies and possibilities to that narrow formation. But even in the physical man there are other elements and he cannot live altogether as the human animal concerned with birth and death and procreation and the satisfaction of common impulses and desires and the maintenance of the life and the body: this is his normal type of personality, but it is crossed, however feebly, with influences by which he can proceed, if they are developed, to a higher human evolution. If the inner subtle-physical Purusha insists, he can arrive at the idea of a finer, more beautiful and perfect physical life and hope or attempt to realize it in his own or in the collective or group existence.” CWSA-22/The Life Divine/p-931-32, 

 

15: “It is here that the surface vital personality of life-self asserts its dominance, and this dominance of the ignorant vital being is the principal active source of discord and disharmony, a cause of inner and outer perturbations of life, a mainspring of wrong-doing and evil. The natural vital element in us, in so far as it is unchecked or untrained or retains its primitive character, is not concerned with truth or right consciousness or right action; it is concerned with self-affirmation, with life-growth, with possession, with satisfaction of impulse, with all satisfactions of desire… It does not follow that this is all that the vital personality is in its native composition or that evil is its very nature. It is not primarily concerned with truth and good, but it can have the passion for truth and good as it has, more spontaneously, the passion for joy and beauty. In all that is developed by the life-force there is developed at the same time a secret delight somewhere in the being, a delight in good and a delight in evil, a delight in truth and a delight in falsehood, a delight in life and an attraction to death, a delight in pleasure and a delight in pain, in one’s own suffering and the suffering of others, but also in one’s own joy and happiness and good and the joy and happiness and good of others… It is only if the inner or true vital being replaces the outer life-personality that the drive of the vital ego can be wholly overcome and the life-force become the servant of the soul and a powerful instrumentation for the action of our true spiritual being.”  CWSA-21/The Life Divine/p-644, 645, 646,

 

16: “In others it is the vital self, the being of life, who dominates and rules the mind, the will, the action: then is created the vital man, concerned with self-affirmation, self-aggrandisement, life-enlargement, satisfaction of ambition and passion and impulse and desire, the claims of his ego, domination, power, excitement, battle and struggle, inner and outer adventure: all else is incidental or subordinated to this movement and building and expression of the vital ego. But still in the vital man too there are or can be other elements of a growing mental or spiritual character, even if these happen to be less developed than his life-personality and life-power. The nature of the vital man is more active, stronger and more mobile, more turbulent and chaotic, often to the point of being quite unregulated, than that of the physical man who holds on to the soil and has a certain material poise and balance, but it is more kinetic and creative: for the element of the vital being is not earth but air; it has more movement, less status. A vigorous vital mind and will can grasp and govern the kinetic vital energies, but it is more by a forceful compulsion and constraint than by a harmonization of the being. If, however, a strong vital personality, mind and will can get the reasoning intelligence to give it a firm support and be its minister, then a certain kind of forceful formation can be made, more or less balanced but always powerful, successful and effective, which can impose itself in the nature and environment and arrive at a strong self-affirmation in life and action. This is the second step of harmonized formulation possible in the ascent of the nature.” CWSA-22/The Life Divine/p-932, 

 

17: “As there has been established on earth a mental Consciousness and Power which shapes a race of mental beings and takes up into itself all of earthly nature that is ready for the change, so now there will be established on earth a gnostic Consciousness and Power which will shape a race of Gnostic spiritual beings and take up into itself all of earth-nature that is ready for this new transformation. It will also receive into itself from above, progressively, from its own domain of perfect light and power and beauty all that is ready to descend from that domain into terrestrial being. For the evolution proceeded in the past by the upsurging at each critical stage, of a concealed Power from its involution in the Inconscience, but also by a descent from above, from its own plane, of that Power already self-realised in its own higher natural province. In all these previous stages there has been a division between surface self and consciousness and subliminal self and consciousness; the surface was formed mainly under the push of the upsurging force from below, by the Inconscient developing a slowly emergent formulation of a concealed force of the spirit, the subliminal partly in this way but mainly by a simultaneous influx of the largeness of the same force from above: a mental and a vital being descended into the subliminal parts and formed from its secret station there a mental or a vital personality on the surface. But before the Supramental change can begin, the veil between the subliminal and the surface parts must have been already broken down; the influx, the descent will be in the entire consciousness as a whole, it will not take place partly behind a veil: the process will be no longer a concealed, obscure and ambiguous procedure but an open outflowering consciously felt and followed by the whole being in its transmutation. In other respects the process will be identical, --a Supramental inflow from above, the descent of a Gnostic being into the nature and an emergence of the concealed Supramental force from below; the influx and unveiling between them will remove what is left of the nature of the Ignorance. The rule of the Inconscience will be hanged by the outburst of the greater secret Consciousness within it, the hidden Light, into what it always was in reality, a sea of the secret Superconscience. A first formation of a gnostic consciousness and nature will be the consequence.” CWSA-22/The Life Divine/p-1002-03, 

 

18: “Therefore there is, as well as a shifting or change of Time-point and Space-field, a constant modifying change of the sum of circumstances experienced in Time and Space and as the result a constant modification of mental personality which is the form of our superficial or apparent self. All this change of circumstance is summed up in philosophical language as causality; for in this stream of the cosmic movement the antecedent state seems to be the cause of a subsequent state, or else this subsequent state seems to be the result of a previous action of persons, objects or forces: yet in fact what we call cause may very well be only circumstance. Thus the mind has over and above its direct self-consciousness a more or less indirect mutable self-experience which it divides into two parts, (1) its subjective experience of the ever-modified mental states of its personality and (2) its objective experience of the ever-changing environment which seems partly or wholly to cause and is yet at the same time itself affected by the workings of that personality. But all this experience is at bottom subjective; for even the objective and external is only known to mind in the form of subjective impressions.” CWSA-21/The Life Divine/p-531-32, 

 

19: “At higher stage of the evolution of personality the being of mind may rule; there is then created the mental man who lives predominantly in the mind as the others live in the vital and the physical nature. The mental man tends to subordinate to his mental self-expression, mental aims, mental interests or to a mental idea or ideal the rest of his being: because of the difficulty of this subordination and its potent effect when achieved, it is at once more difficult for him and easier to arrive at a harmony of his nature. It is easier because the mental will once in control can convince by the power of reasoning intelligence and at the same time dominate, compress or suppress the life and the body and their demands, arrange and harmonise them, force them to be its instruments, even reduce them to a minimum so that they shall not disturb the mental life or pull it down from its ideative or idealizing movement. It is more difficult because life and body are the first powers and, if they are in the least strong, can impose themselves with an almost irresistible insistence on the mental ruler. Man is a mental being and the mind is the leader of his life and body; but this is a leader who is much led by his followers and has sometimes no other will than what they impose on him. Mind in spite of its power is often impotent before the inconscient and Subconscient which obscure its clarity and carry it away on the tide of instinct or impulse; in spite of its clarity it is fooled by vital and emotional suggestions into giving sanction to ignorance and error, to wrong thought and to wrong action, or it is obliged to look on while the nature follows what it knows to be wrong, dangerous or evil. Even when it is strong and clear and dominant, Mind though it imposes a certain, a considerable mentalised harmony, cannot integrate the whole being and nature. These harmonisations by an inferior control are, besides, inconclusive, because it is one part of the nature which dominates and fulfils itself while the others are coerced and denied their fullness. They can be steps on the way, but not final; therefore in most men there is no such sole dominance and effected partial harmony, but only a predominance and for the rest an unstable equilibrium of personality of half formed, half in formation, sometimes a disequilibrium or unbalance due to the lack of a central government or the disturbance of a formerly achieved partial poise. All must be transitional until a first though not a final, true harmonization is achieved by finding our real centre.” CWSA-22/The Life Divine/p-932-933-934, 

 

20: “Moreover, we find in this inner or subliminal being the means of directly distinguishing between what rises from within and what comes to us from outside, from others or from universal Nature, and it becomes possible to exercise a control, a choice, a power of willed reception, rejection and selection, a clear power of self-building and harmonisation which we do not possess or can operate very imperfectly in our composed surface personality but which is the prerogative of our inner Person. For by this entry into the depths the inner being, no longer quite veiled, no longer obliged to exercise a fragmentary influence on its outer instrumental consciousness, is able to formulate itself more luminously in our life in the physical universe.” CWSA-21/The Life Divine/p-553-54, 

 

21: “If it be said that subjective experience or subtle-sense images can easily be deceptive, since we have no recognised method or standard of verification and a too great tendency to admit the extraordinary and miraculous or supernatural at its face value, this may be admitted: but error is not the prerogative of the inner subjective or subliminal parts of us, it is also an appanage (something granted as special favor) of the physical mind and its objective methods and standards, and such liability to error cannot be a reason for shutting out a large and important domain of experience; it is a reason rather for scrutinising it and finding out in it its own true standards and its characteristic, appropriate and valid means of verification. Our subjective being is the basis of our objective experience, and it is not probable that only its physical objectivisations are true and the rest unreliable. The subliminal consciousness, when rightly interrogated, is a witness to truth and its testimony is confirmed again even in the physical and the objective field that testimony cannot, then, be disregarded when it call our attention to things within us or to things that belong to planes or worlds of supraphysical experience.” CWSA-22/The Life Divine/p-803-04, 

 

22: “There is indeed a soul personality, representative of this entity, already built up within us, which puts forward a fine psychic element in our natural being: but this finer factor in our normal make-up is not yet dominant and has only a limited action. Our soul is not the overt guide and master of our thought and acts; it has to rely on the mental, vital, physical instruments for self-expression and is constantly overpowered by our mind and life-force: but if once it can succeed in remaining in constant communion with its own larger occult reality, --and this can only happen when we go deep into our subliminal parts, --it is no longer dependent, it can become powerful and sovereign, armed with an intrinsic spiritual perception of the truth of things and a spontaneous discernment which separates that truth from the falsehood of the Ignorance and Inconscience, distinguishes the divine and the undivine in the manifestation and so can be the luminous leader of our other parts of nature. It is indeed when this happens that there can be the turning-point towards an integral transformation and an integral knowledge… For much more than the mind or life which can turn either to good or to evil, it is the soul-personality, the psychic being, which insists on the distinction, though in a larger sense than the mere moral difference. It is the soul in us which turns always towards Truth, Good and Beauty; because it is by these things that it itself grows in stature; the rest, their opposites, are a necessary part of experience, but have to be outgrown in the spiritual increase of the being.” CWSA-21/The Life Divine/p-559, 632, 

 

23: “All views of existence that stop short of the Transcendence and ignore it must be incomplete accounts of the truth of being. The pantheistic view of the identity of the Divine and the Universe is a truth, for all this that is the Brahman: but it stops short of the whole truth when it misses and omits the supracosmic Reality. On the other side, every view that affirms the cosmos only and dismisses the individual as a by-product of the cosmic Energy, errs by laying too much emphasis on one apparent factual aspect of the world-action; it is true only of the natural individual and is not even the whole truth of that: for the natural individual, the nature-being, is indeed a product of the universal Energy, but is at the same time a nature–personality of the soul, an expressive formation of the inner being and person, and this soul is not a perishable cell or a dissoluble  portion of the cosmic Spirit, but has its original immortal reality in the Transcendence.  It is a fact that the cosmic Beingexpresses itself through the individual being, but also it is a truth that the Transcendental Reality expresses itself through both the individual existence and the Cosmos; the soul is an eternal portion of the Supreme and not a fraction of Nature. But equally any view that sees the universe as existent only in the individual consciousness must very evidently be a fragmentary truth: it is justified by a perception of the universality of the spiritual individual and his power of embracing the whole universe in his consciousness; but neither the cosmos nor the individual consciousness is the fundamental truth of existence; for both depend upon and exist by the transcendent Divine Being.” CWSA-22/The Life Divine/p-687-88,

 

24: “As the psychic personality grows stronger, it begins to increase its communion with the psychic entity behind it and improve its communications with the surface: it can transmit its intimations to the mind and heart and life with a greater purity and force; for it is more able to exercise a strong control and react against false mixture; now more and more it makes itself distinctly felt as a power in the nature. But even so this evolution would be slow and long if left solely to the difficult automatic action of the evolutionary Energy; it is only when man awakes to the knowledge of the soul and feels a need to bring it to the front and make it the master of his life and action that a quicker conscious method of evolution intervenes and a psychic transformation becomes possible… But in man the psychic part of the personality is able to develop with a much greater rapidity than in the inferior creation, and a time can arrive when the soul entity is close to the point at which it will emerge from behind the veil into the open and become the master of its instrumentation in Nature…This may happen long before the psycho-spiritual change is complete or even before it as well begun or proceeded far, because the psychic personality has become aware and has an eager concentration towards the superconscience…This (transformation of Nature) can be done from within by an invisible action through the psychic entity and the psychic personality; a consciously felt descent from above is not indispensable.” CWSA-22/The Life Divine/p-928-29, 877, 944, 967, 

 

25: “As the crust of the outer nature cracks, as the walls of inner separation break down, the inner light gets through, the inner fire burns in the heart, the substance of the nature and the stuff of consciousness refine to a greater subtlety and purity, and the deeper  psychic experiences, those which are not solely of an inner mental or inner vital character, become possible in this subtler, purer, finer substance; the soul begins to unveil itself, the psychic personality reaches its full stature. The soul, the psychic entity, then manifests itself as the central being which upholds mind and life and body and supports all the other powers and functions of the Spirit; it takes up its greater function as the guide and ruler of the nature. A guidance, a governance begins from within which exposes every movement to the light of Truth, repels what is false, obscure, opposed to the divine realisation: every region of the being, every nook and corner of it, every movement, formation, direction, inclination of thought, will, emotion, sensation, action, reaction, motive, disposition, propensity, desire, habit of the conscious or subconscious physical, even the most concealed, camouflaged, mute, recondite, is lighted up with the unerring psychic light, their confusions dissipated, their tangles disentangled, their obscurities, deceptions, self-deceptions precisely indicated and removed; all is purified, set right, the whole nature harmonised, modulated in the psychic key, put in spiritual order. This process may be rapid or tardy according to the amount of obscurity and resistance still left in the nature, but it goes on unfalteringly so long as it is not complete.  As a final result the whole conscious being is made perfectly apt for spiritual experience of every kind, turned towards spiritual truth of thought, feeling, sense, action, tuned to the right responses, delivered from the darkness and stubbornness of the tamasic inertia, the turbidities and turbulences and impurities of the rajasic passion and restless unharmonised kinetism, the enlightened rigidities and sattwic limitations or poised balancements of constructed equilibrium which are the character of the Ignorance.” CWSA-22/The Life Divine/p-941, “This may happen long before the psycho-spiritual change is complete or even before it as well begun or proceeded far, because the psychic personality has become aware and has an eager concentration towards the superconscience.” CWSA-22/The Life Divine/p-944,