Sri Aurobindo

Letters of Sri Aurobindo

First Series

Fragment ID: 20434

I have used the words Jiva and Jivatman in these and all passages in exactly the same sense – it never occurred to me that there could be a difference. If I had so intended it, I would have drawn the distinction – the two words being similar – very clearly and not left it to be gathered by inference. In the passage from the chapter on the triple status of the Supermind I was describing how the Supermind working as a force of the highest self-determination of the Divine manifested it in three poises and what was the consciousness of the Jivatman in a Supramental creation. There is no statement chat the place of the Jivatman is in the Supramental plane alone, if that were so man could have no knowledge of his individual Self or Spirit before he rose to the Supramental plane; he could not have any experience of the Self, though he may have the sense of the dissolution of his ego in something Universal. But he can become aware of his unborn non-evolving Self, a centre of the Divine consciousness, long before that; the Self cosmic or individual is experienced long before rising to Supermind. If it were not so, spiritual experience of that high kind would be impossible to mental man, liberation. would be impossible; he would first have to become a Supramental being. As for the Purusha it is there on all planes: there is a mental Purusha, manomaya, leader of the life and body, as the Upanishad puts it, a vital, a physical Purusha; there is the psychic being or Chaitya Purusha which supports and carries all these as it were. One may say that these are projections of the Jivatman put there to uphold Prakriti on the various levels of the being. The Upanishad speaks also of a Supramental and a Bliss Purusha, and if the Supramental and the Bliss Nature were organised in the evolution on earth we could become aware of them upholding the movements here.

As for the psychic being, it enters into the evolution, enters into the body at birth and goes out of it at death; but the Jivatman as I know it is unborn and eternal although upholding the manifested personality from above. The psychic being can be described as the Jivatman entering into birth, if you like, but if the distinction is not made, then the nature of the Atman is blurred and a confusion arises. This is a necessary distinction for metaphysical knowledge and for something that is very important in spiritual experience. The word Atman like ‘spirit’ in English is popularly used in all kinds of senses, but both for spiritual and philosophical knowledge it is necessary to be clear and precise in one’s use of terms so as to avoid confusion of thought and vision by confusion in the words we use to express them.