Purification—The Lower Mentality / Sri Aurobindo
WE HAVE to deal with the complex action of all these instruments and set about their purification. And the simplest way will be to fasten on the two kinds of radical defect in each, distinguish clearly in what they consist and set them right. But there is also the question where we are to begin.
For the entanglement is great, the complete purification of one instrument
depends on the complete purification too of all the others, and that is a great source of difficulty, disappointment and
perplexity,—as when we think we have got the intelligence purified, only to
find that it is still subject to attack and over clouding because the emotions
of the heart and the will and sensational mind are still affected by the many
impurities of the lower nature and they get back into the enlightened buddhi
and prevent it from reflecting the pure truth for which we are seeking. But we
have on the other hand this advantage that one important instrument
sufficiently purified can be used as a means for the purification of the
others, one step firmly taken makes easier all the others and gets rid of a
host of difficulties.
Which instrument then by its purification and perfection will bring about
most easily and effectively or can aid with a most powerful rapidity the
perfection of the rest?
Since we are the spirit
enveloped in mind, a soul evolved here as a mental being in a living physical
body, it must naturally be in the mind, the antahkarana, that we must look for this desideratum. And in the
mind it is evidently by the buddhi, the intelligence and the will of the
intelligence that the human being is intended to do whatever work is not done
for him by the physical or nervous nature as in the plant and the animal.
Pending the evolution of any higher supramental power the intelligent will must
be our main force for effectuation and to purify it becomes a very primary
necessity. Once our intelligence and
will are well purified of all that limits them and gives them a wrong action or
wrong direction, they can easily be perfected, can be made to respond to the
suggestions of Truth, understand themselves and the rest of the being, see
clearly and with a fine and scrupulous accuracy what they are doing and follow
out the right way to do it without any hesitating or eager error or stumbling
deviation. Eventually their response can be opened up to the perfect
discernings, intuitions, inspirations, revelations of the supermind and proceed
by a more and more luminous and even infallible action.
The psychic prana
But this purification cannot be effected without a preliminary clearing of
its natural obstacles in the other lower parts of the antahkarana, and the chief natural obstacle
running through the whole action of the antahkarana, through the sense, the
mental sensation, emotion, dynamic impulse, intelligence, will, is the intermiscence and the compelling
claim of the psychic prana.
This then must be dealt with,
its dominating intermiscence ruled out, its claim denied, itself quieted and
prepared for purification. Each
instrument has, it has been said, a proper and legitimate action and also a
deformation or wrong principle of its proper action.
The proper action of the psychic prana is pure possession and enjoyment,
bhoga. To enjoy thought, will, action, dynamic impulse, result of action,
emotion, sense, sensation, to enjoy too by their means objects, persons, life,
the world, is the activity for which this prana gives us a psycho-physical
basis. A really perfect enjoyment of existence can only come when what we enjoy
is not the world in itself or for itself, but God in the world, when it is not
things, but the Ananda of the spirit in things that forms the real, essential
object of our enjoying and things only as form and symbol of the spirit, waves
of the ocean of Ananda. But this Ananda can only come at all when we can get at
and reflect in our members the hidden spiritual being, and its fullness can
only be had when we climb to the supramental ranges.
The proper function of psychic prana
Meanwhile there is a just and permissible, a quite legitimate human
enjoyment of these things, which is, to speak in the language of Indian
psychology, predominantly sattvic in its nature. It is an
enlightened enjoyment principally by the perceptive, aesthetic and emotive
mind, secondarily only by the sensational, nervous and physical being, but all
subject to the clear government of the buddhi, to a right reason, a right will,
a right reception of the life impacts, a right order, a right feeling of the
truth, law, ideal sense, beauty, use of things. The mind gets the pure taste of
enjoyment of them, rasa, and rejects whatever is perturbed, troubled and
perverse. Into this acceptance of the clear and limpid rasa, the psychic prana
has to bring in the full sense of life and the occupying enjoyment by the whole
being, bhoga, without which the acceptance and possession by the mind,
rasa-grahana, would not be concrete enough, would be too tenuous to satisfy
altogether the embodied soul. This contribution is its proper function.
The deformative function of psychic prana
/ desire
The deformation which enters
in and prevents the purity, is a form of vital craving; the grand deformation which the psychic prana contributes to our being,
is desire.
The root of desire is the vital craving to seize upon that which we feel we
have not, it is the limited life’s instinct for possession and satisfaction.
It creates the sense of
want,—first the simpler vital craving of hunger, thirst, lust, then these
psychical hungers, thirsts, lusts of the mind which are a much greater and more
instant and pervading affliction of our being, the hunger which is infinite
because it is the hunger of an infinite being, the thirst which is only
temporarily lulled by satisfaction, but is in its nature insatiable.
The psychic prana invades the
sensational mind and brings into it the unquiet thirst of sensations, invades
the dynamic mind with the lust of control, having, domination, success,
fulfillment of every impulse, fills the emotional mind with the desire for the
satisfaction of liking and disliking, for the wreaking of love and hate, brings
the shrinkings and panics of fear and the strainings and disappointments of
hope, imposes the tortures of grief and the brief fevers and excitements of
joy, makes the intelligence and intelligent will the accomplices of all these
things and turns them in their own kind into deformed and lame instruments, the
will into a will of craving and the intelligence into a partial, a stumbling
and an eager pursuer of limited, impatient, militant prejudgment and opinion.
Desire is the root of all sorrow, disappointment, affliction, for though it
has a feverish joy of pursuit and satisfaction, yet
because it is always a straining of the being, it carries into its pursuit and
its getting a labour, hunger, struggle, a rapid subjection to fatigue, a sense
of limitation, dissatisfaction and early disappointment with all its gains, a
ceaseless morbid stimulation, trouble, disquiet, ashanti.
To get rid of desire is the one firm indispensable purification of the
psychical prana,—for so we can replace the soul of desire with
its pervading immiscence in all our instruments by a mental soul of calm
delight and its clear and limpid possession of ourselves and world and Nature
which is the crystal basis of the mental life and its perfection.
The psychical prana interferes
in all the higher operations to deform them, but its defect is itself due to
its being interfered with and deformed by the nature of the physical workings
in the body which Life has evolved in its emergence from matter. It is that
which has created the separation of the individual life in the body from the
life of the universe and stamped on it the character of want, limitation,
hunger, thirst, craving for what it has not, a long groping after enjoyment and
a hampered and baffled need of possession. Easily
regulated and limited in the purely physical order of things, it extends itself
in the psychical prana immensely and becomes, as the mind grows, a thing with
difficulty limited, insatiable, irregular, a busy creator of disorder and
disease. Moreover, the psychical prana leans on the physical life, limits
itself by the nervous force of the physical being, limits thereby the
operations of the mind and becomes the link of its dependence on the body and
its subjection to fatigue, incapacity, disease, disorder, insanity, the pettiness,
the precariousness and even the possible dissolution of the workings of the
physical mentality. Our mind instead of being a thing powerful in its own
strength, a clear instrument of conscious spirit, free and able to control, use
and perfect the life and body, appears in the result a mixed construction; it
is a predominantly physical mentality limited by its physical organs and
subject to the demands and to the obstructions of the life in the body. This
can only be got rid of by a sort of practical, inward psychological operation
of analysis by which we become aware of the mentality as a separate power,
isolate it for a free working, distinguish too the psychical and the physical
prana and make them no longer a link for dependence, but a transmitting channel
for the Idea and Will in the buddhi, obedient to its suggestions and commands;
the prana then becomes a passive means of effectuation for the mind’s direct
control of the physical life. This control, however abnormal to our habitual
poise of action, is not only possible,—it appears to some extent in the
phenomena of hypnosis, though these are unhealthily abnormal, because there it
is a foreign will which suggests and commands,—but must become the normal
action when the higher Self within takes up the direct command of the whole
being. This control can be exercised perfectly, however, only from the
supramental level, for it is there that the true effective Idea and Will reside
and the mental thought-mind, even spiritualised, is only a limited, though it may
be made a very powerful deputy.
Desire, it is thought, is the real motive power of human living and to cast it out would be to stop the springs of life; satisfaction of desire is man’s only enjoyment and to eliminate it would be to extinguish the impulse of life by a quietistic asceticism. But the real motive power of the life of the soul is Will; desire is only a deformation of will in the dominant bodily life and physical mind. The essential turn of the soul to possession and enjoyment of the world consists in a will to delight, and the enjoyment of the satisfaction of craving is only a vital and physical degradation of the will to delight. It is essential that we should distinguish between pure will and desire, between the inner will to delight and the outer lust and craving of the mind and body. If we are unable to make this distinction practically in the experience of our being, we can only make a choice between a life-killing asceticism and the gross will to live or else try to effect an awkward, uncertain and precarious compromise between them. This is in fact what the mass of men do; a small minority trample down the life instinct and strain after an ascetic perfection; most obey the gross will to live with such modifications and restraints as society imposes or the normal social man has been trained to impose on his own mind and actions; others set up a balance between ethical austerity and temperate indulgence of the desiring mental and vital self and see in this balance the golden mean of a sane mind and healthy human living. But none of these ways gives the perfection which we are seeking, the divine government of the will in life. To tread down altogether the prana, the vital being, is to kill the force of life by which the large action of the embodied soul in the human being must be supported; to indulge the gross will to live is to remain satisfied with imperfection; to compromise between them is to stop half way and possess neither earth nor heaven. But if we can get at the pure will undeformed by desire,—which we shall find to be a much more free, tranquil, steady and effective force than the leaping, smoke-stifled, soon fatigued and baffled flame of desire,—and at the calm inner will of delight not afflicted or limited by any trouble of craving, we can then transform the prana from a tyrant, enemy, assailant of the mind into an obedient instrument. We may call these greater things, too, by the name of desire, if we choose, but then we must suppose that there is a divine desire other than the vital craving, a God desire of which this other and lower phenomenon is an obscure shadow and into which it has to be transfigured. It is better to keep distinct names for things which are entirely different in their character and inner action.
Desire, it is thought, is the real motive power of human living and to cast it out would be to stop the springs of life; satisfaction of desire is man’s only enjoyment and to eliminate it would be to extinguish the impulse of life by a quietistic asceticism. But the real motive power of the life of the soul is Will; desire is only a deformation of will in the dominant bodily life and physical mind. The essential turn of the soul to possession and enjoyment of the world consists in a will to delight, and the enjoyment of the satisfaction of craving is only a vital and physical degradation of the will to delight. It is essential that we should distinguish between pure will and desire, between the inner will to delight and the outer lust and craving of the mind and body. If we are unable to make this distinction practically in the experience of our being, we can only make a choice between a life-killing asceticism and the gross will to live or else try to effect an awkward, uncertain and precarious compromise between them. This is in fact what the mass of men do; a small minority trample down the life instinct and strain after an ascetic perfection; most obey the gross will to live with such modifications and restraints as society imposes or the normal social man has been trained to impose on his own mind and actions; others set up a balance between ethical austerity and temperate indulgence of the desiring mental and vital self and see in this balance the golden mean of a sane mind and healthy human living. But none of these ways gives the perfection which we are seeking, the divine government of the will in life. To tread down altogether the prana, the vital being, is to kill the force of life by which the large action of the embodied soul in the human being must be supported; to indulge the gross will to live is to remain satisfied with imperfection; to compromise between them is to stop half way and possess neither earth nor heaven. But if we can get at the pure will undeformed by desire,—which we shall find to be a much more free, tranquil, steady and effective force than the leaping, smoke-stifled, soon fatigued and baffled flame of desire,—and at the calm inner will of delight not afflicted or limited by any trouble of craving, we can then transform the prana from a tyrant, enemy, assailant of the mind into an obedient instrument. We may call these greater things, too, by the name of desire, if we choose, but then we must suppose that there is a divine desire other than the vital craving, a God desire of which this other and lower phenomenon is an obscure shadow and into which it has to be transfigured. It is better to keep distinct names for things which are entirely different in their character and inner action.
The first step in purification
To rid the prana of desire and incidentally to reverse the ordinary poise
of our nature and turn the vital being from a troublesomely dominant power into
the obedient instrument of a free and unattached mind, is then the first step
in purification. As this deformation of the psychical prana is
corrected, the purification of the rest of the intermediary parts of the
antahkarana is facilitated, and when that correction is completed, their
purification too can be easily made absolute.
These intermediary parts are the emotional mind, the receptive sensational mind and the active sensational mind or mind of dynamic
impulse. They all hang together in a strongly knotted interaction.
The duality of the emotional mind, (raga-dvesha, like-dislike, attraction
and repulsion)
The deformation of the
emotional mind hinges upon the duality of liking and disliking, raga-dvesha,
emotional attraction and repulsion. All the complexity of our emotions and
their tyranny over the soul arise from the habitual responses of the soul of
desire (the vital ego) in the emotions and sensations to these attractions and
repulsions.
Love and hatred, hope and
fear, grief and joy all have their founts in this one source. We like, love,
welcome, hope for, joy in whatever our nature, the first habit of our being, or
else a formed (often perverse) habit, the second nature of our being, presents
to the mind as pleasant, priyam; we hate, dislike, fear, have repulsion from or
grief of whatever it presents to us as unpleasant, apriyam. This habit of the
emotional nature gets into the way of the intelligent will and makes it often a
helpless slave of the emotional being or at least prevents it from exercising a
free judgment and government of the nature. This deformation has to be
corrected. By getting rid of desire in
the psychic prana and its intermiscence in the emotional mind, we facilitate
the correction. For then attachment which is the strong bond of the heart,
falls away from the heart-strings; the involuntary habit of raga-dvesha
remains, but, not being made obstinate by attachment, it can be dealt with more
easily by the will and the intelligence. The restless heart can be conquered
and get rid of the habit of attraction and repulsion. But then if this is done,
it may be thought, as with regard to desire, that this will be the death of the
emotional being. It will certainly be so, if the deformation is eliminated but
not replaced by the right action of the emotional mind; the mind will then pass
into a neutral condition of blank indifference or into a luminous state of
peaceful impartiality with no stir or wave of emotion. The former state is in
no way desirable; the latter may be the perfection of a quietistic discipline,
but in the integral perfection which does not reject love or shun various
movement of delight, it can be no more than a stage which has to be overpassed,
a preliminary passivity admitted as a first basis for a right activity.
Attraction and repulsion,
liking and disliking are a necessary mechanism for the normal man, they form a
first principle of natural instinctive selection among the thousand flattering
and formidable, helpful and dangerous impacts of the world around him.
The buddhi starts with this
material to work on and tries to correct the natural and instinctive by a wiser
reasoned and willed selection; for obviously the pleasant is not always the
right thing, the object to be preferred and selected, nor the unpleasant the
wrong thing, the object to be shunned and rejected; the pleasant and the good,
preyas and sreyas, have to be distinguished, and right reason has to choose and
not the caprice of emotion. But this it can do much better when the emotional
suggestion is withdrawn and the heart rests in a luminous passivity. Then too
the right activity of the heart can be brought to the surface; for we find then that behind this
emotion-ridden soul of desire there was waiting all the while a soul of love
and lucid joy and delight, a pure psyche, which was clouded over by the
deformations of anger, fear, hatred, repulsion and could not embrace the world
with an impartial love and joy. But the purified heart is rid of anger, rid
of fear, rid of hatred, rid of every shrinking and repulsion: it has a
universal love, it can receive with an untroubled sweetness and clarity the
various delight which God gives it in the world. But it is not the lax slave of
love and delight; it does not desire, does not attempt to impose itself as the
master of the actions. The selective process necessary to action is left
principally to the buddhi and, when the buddhi has been overpassed, to the
spirit in the supramental will, knowledge and Ananda. The receptive sensational
mind is the nervous mental basis of the affections; it receives mentally the
impacts of things and gives to them the responses of mental pleasure and pain
which are the starting-point of the duality of emotional liking and disliking.
All the heart’s emotions have a corresponding nervous-mental accompaniment, and
we often find that when the heart is freed of any will to the dualities, there
still survives a root of disturbance of nervous mind, or a memory in physical
mind which falls more and more away to a quite physical character, the more it
is repelled by the will in the buddhi. It becomes finally a mere suggestion
from outside to which the nervous chords of the mind still occasionally respond
until a complete purity liberates them into the same luminous universality of
delight which the pure heart already possesses. The active dynamic mind of
impulse is the lower organ or channel of responsive action; its deformation is
a subjection to the suggestions of the impure emotional and sensational mentality
and the desire of the prana, to impulses to action dictated by grief, fear,
hatred, desire, lust, craving, and the rest of the unquiet brood. Its right
form of action is a pure dynamic force of strength, courage, temperamental
power, not acting for itself or in obedience to the lower members, but as an
impartial channel for the dictates of the pure intelligence and will or the
supramental Purusha. When we have got
rid of these deformations and cleared the mentality for these truer forms of
action, the lower mentality is purified and ready for perfection. But that
perfection depends on the possession of a purified and enlightened buddhi; for
the buddhi is the chief power in the mental being and the chief mental
instrument of the Purusha.