SRI AUROBINDO
ESSAYS IN PHILOSOPHY AND YOGA
SHORTER WORKS — 1910-1950
Chapter XXX.
Memory, Ego and Self-Experience: Argument1
Consciousness of Self has two different aspects, the awareness of a stable, immutable and timeless Self beyond mentality and the awareness of a various self-experience in the process of Time and the field of Space. There is a constant shifting of the point of Time, a constant though less obvious changing of the habitation and the environment and in these a constant subjective modifying of the experience of the states of personality and the experience of the environment. – Memory here is an indispensable factor in the linking of past and present experience and is necessary to secure its continuity and coherence. Still Memory is not all; it is only a mediator between the mind-sense and the coordinating mind. – It is the mind-sense which shapes the object of experience as a wave of the conscious being into a movement of emotion, vitality, sensation or thought-perception. There is also an act of mental observation and valuation of this wave in the sense-mind. There is also the subject or mental being who thus modifies his mental becoming and observes and values it by an act of mind. It is when the mental being stands back from the mental becoming and even from the mental act that he begins to perceive himself as something different from all becoming, mutable in that, but immutable beyond it. He is not two selves, one that is and one that becomes, but one immutable who sees changing phenomena of his being, the immutability evident to a direct and pure self-consciousness, the mutable evident indirectly through a conditional and secondary mental consciousness. – It is the character of this indirect mental consciousness which can experience only by succession of Time that brings in the device of Memory. Memory is not the essence of mental experience of becoming, nor of its continuity, nor of the recurrence of the same experience or the same cause and effect in Time. These are circumstances of the movement of the stuff of conscious being and conscious force of being, a movement which is really undivided though only seen by mind in artificial divisions. Memory is a device by which the experiences of the mind-sense are linked together and these artificial divisions in Time bridged over so that the coordinating mind and will may better and better use the material of experience and impose order on its conscious knowledge of its self and its conscious action in its environment. It is an aid to our ignorance of self developing, in the evolution of mind out of inconscient force, knowledge of self by experience. – The ego-sense is a mental device by which the mental being develops towards knowledge of that which experiences as well as of that which is experienced. Memory only tells us that the successive experiences have happened in the same field of conscious being; it is the coordinating and distinguishing mind which tells us that it is the same mental being who experiences. – Mind-substance suffers the changes of becoming; mind-sense experiences them; memory assures the mind-sense of its continuity of experience; the coordinating mind of knowledge relates them together and relates them also to the ego or being who, it says, is the same in past and present whether he forgets or remembers. In the animal this may be little more than a coordination in the sense-mind by a discernment largely involved in the sensations and the memories, but in man it becomes a coordinating reason superior to sense and memory. It is by this development that the ego-sense becomes distinct and disengaged from its aids. – But it is itself only a device and basis for self-development of true self-knowledge; it is a stage in the evolution from nescience to partial knowledge and from partial knowledge to true self-consciousness. The evolving Mind becomes by it aware of an “I” that becomes and then of a self superior to the becoming. It may fix on either to the rejection of the other, but in doing so it acts on an imperfect self-knowledge. It is as yet ignorant of all even of the individual 
becoming which is not superficial; ignorant of the universal becoming except indirectly, as a not-self exterior to it. Its attempt to find the true relation of the self and its becomings is based therefore on an Ignorance; that can only be truly known by an attempt to live out the relation in an integral development of self-knowledge. That is the natural goal of our evolution which is the movement of the Ignorance to exceed itself and arrive at the conscious Truth of its being and conscious knowledge of all being.
Arya. 02.1916 / 04.1917
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1917
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