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Sri Aurobindo

Essays Divine and Human

Writings from Manuscripts. 1910 – 1950

Integral Yoga

The Yoga of Transformation

165

Yoga is not only a discovery of our concealed spiritual status but a dynamic spiritual self-creation; a triple transformation is the heart of its process and the revelation of its entire significance.

Its first step is the unveiling of the soul;1 for there [is a] secret psychic being, a divine element in our depths that is concealed even more than garbed by the mind, body and life. To bring it out of its seclusion where it lives like a spiritual king without apparent power served and replaced by its ministers, so that it may take over the whole active government of the nature is the first great unfolding, the initial potent self-discovery of the Yoga. Mind the thinker is the prime minister in us who covers the king, but mind too is dominated and led by the vital powers, the strong and violent of the realm, who force it to serve their purpose and these too can only act with the means given them by the body and physical nature, the inert hardly conscious subject existence whose passive assent and docile instrumentation is yet indispensable to its rulers. This is our present constitution and it amounts to no more than a sort of organised confusion, a feudal order that is an ignorant half anarchy and cannot make the most of the possibilities and resources even of the limited tract of nature which we inhabit, much less reveal to us and exploit our spiritual empire. To reinstate the king-soul is the first step in a needed revolution — the soul directing the mind will exercise through it its sovereign power over the powers of life and subject to them in their turn an enlightened and psychically consenting body. But this is not all; for soul-discovery is not complete without a psychic new creation of the mental, vital and physical instrumentation of nature. The mind will be recast by the soul's intuition of Truth, the vital being by its perception of power and good, the body and whole nature by its command for light, harmony and beauty. Our nature will become that of a true psychic entity, not a brute creation unified by a precarious life and illumined by the candlelight of a struggling intelligence.

Circa 1927/33

 

1 Reproduced below is another, incomplete version of this passage:

Its first step [the word step in manuscript cancelled without substitution] is the unveiling of the soul, the psychic entity, now covered by the superficial activity of mind and life and body. The soul is the deep hidden natural divine element in us, a permanent portion of the Godhead which persists in a spiritual permanence and ensures our immortality of being; for without it there could be only a temporary mechanical formation and action of nature-energy and its phenomenon of substance. This unveiling is accompanied by a psychic transformation of the nature; mind, life and body become truly ensouled and ready for a spiritual change.

Its second step is the revelation of a self and spirit which supports our individual soul manifestation and soul development, but knows itself to be one being with cosmic Godhead and universal Nature and can stand back from that even as a transcendent spirit. By this discovery the being in us exceeds its separate individuality, enters into a cosmic consciousness [in manuscript: conscious], is released into a supracosmic transcendence.

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