THE MENTAL AND THE VITAL EGO
Extract from the book "The Life Divine" of Sri Aurobindo
From the Chapter, The Origin of Falsehood and Evil
But here the second condition or factor of the evolution intervenes; for
this seeking for knowledge is not an impersonal mental process hampered only by
the general limitations of mind-intelligence:
the ego is there, the physical ego, the life ego bent, not on
self-knowledge and the discovery of the truth of things and the truth of life,
but on vital self-affirmation;
a mental ego is there also bent on its own personal self-affirmation and largely directed and used by the
vital urge for its life-desire and life-purpose.
For as mind develops, there develops also
a mental individuality with a personal drive of
mind-tendency, a mental temperament, a mind formation of its own. This surface
mental individuality is ego-centric; it looks at the world and things and happenings
from its own standpoint and sees them not as they are but as they affect
itself: in observing things it gives them the turn suitable to its own tendency
and temperament, selects or rejects, arranges truth according to its own mental
preference and convenience; observation, judgment, reason are all determined or
affected by this mind-personality and assimilated to the needs of the
individuality and the ego.
Even when the mind aims most at a pure impersonality of truth and
reason, a sheer impersonality is impossible to it; even the most trained,
severe and vigilant intellect fails to observe the twists and turns it gives to
truth in the reception of fact and idea and the construction of its mental knowledge.
Here we have an almost inexhaustible source of distortion of truth, a cause of
falsification, an unconscious or half-conscious will to error, an acceptance of
ideas or facts not by a clear perception of the true and the false, but by
preference, personal suitability, temperamental choice, prejudgment.
Here is a fruitful seed-plot for the growth of falsehood or a gate or
many gates through which it can enter by stealth or by an usurping but acceptable
violence. Truth too can enter in and take up its dwelling, not by its own
right, but at the mind’s pleasure.
THE MENTAL INDIVIDUALITY
In the terms of the Sankhya psychology we
can distinguish three types of mental individuality:
TAMASIC: that which is governed by the principle of
obscurity and inertia, first-born of the Inconscience, tamasic;
RAJASIC: that which is governed by a force of
passion and activity, kinetic, rajasic;
SATTVIC: that which is cast in the mould of the sattvic
principle of light, harmony, balance.
The tamasic intelligence
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.
The rajasic intelligence
The rajasic intelligence has its main seat in the vital mind and is of two kinds: 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; 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.
The sattvic intelligence
The sattvic 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 that it can
assimilate, skilful to build truth 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-consciousness by personality and of truth by
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-wilful self-deception, a refusal
to admit true knowledge, a readiness to assert acceptable wrong knowledge as
true knowledge. This is in the field of cognition, but the same law applies
to will and action.
THE VITAL EGO
Out of ignorance a wrong consciousness is created which gives a wrong
dynamic reaction to the contact of persons, things, happenings:
the surface consciousness develops the habit of ignoring,
misunderstanding or rejecting the suggestions to action or against action that
come from the secret inmost consciousness, the psychic entity;
it answers instead to unenlightened mental and vital suggestions, or acts in accordance with the demands and impulsions of the
vital ego.
Here the second of the primary conditions of the evolution, the law of a
separate life-being affirming itself in a world which is not-self to it, comes
into prominence and assumes an immense importance. It is here that the surface vital personality or life-self asserts its
dominance, and this dominance of the ignorant vital being is a principal active source of discord
and disharmony, a cause of inner and outer perturbations of the 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.
This main need and demand of the life-self seems all important to it; it
would readily carry it out without any regard to truth or right or good or any
other consideration: but because mind is there and has these conceptions,
because the soul is there and has these soul-perceptions, it tries to dominate mind and get from it by dictation a sanction
and order of execution for its own will of self-affirmation, a verdict of truth and right and good for its
own vital assertions, impulses, desires; it is concerned with self-justification in order that it may
have room for full self-affirmation.
But if it can get the assent of mind, it is quite ready to ignore all
these standards and set up only one standard, the satisfaction, growth,
strength, greatness of the vital ego.
The life-individual needs place, expansion,
possession of its world, dominance and control of things and beings; it
needs life-room, a space in the sun, self-assertion, survival. It needs these things for itself and for
those with whom it associates itself, for its own ego and for the collective
ego; it needs them for its ideas, creeds, ideals, interests, imaginations:
for it has to assert these forms of I-ness and my-ness and impose them on the world around it or, if it is not strong enough to do
that, it has at least to defend and
maintain them against others to the best of its power and contrivance. It
may try to do it by methods it thinks or chooses to think or represent as
right; it may try to do it by the naked use
of violence, ruse, falsehood, destructive aggression, crushing of other
life-formations: the principle is the same whatever the means or the moral
attitude.
It is not only in the realm of interests, but in the realm of ideas and
the realm of religion that the vital being of man has introduced
this spirit and attitude of self-affirmation and struggle and the use of violence,
oppression and suppression, intolerance, aggression; it has imposed the
principle of life-egoism on the domain of intellectual truth and the domain of
the spirit. Into its self-affirmation
the self-asserting life brings in hatred and dislike towards all that stands in
the way of its expansion or hurts its ego; it develops as a means or as a
passion or reaction of the life-nature cruelty, treachery and all kinds of evil:
its satisfaction of desire and impulse
takes no account of right and wrong, but only of the fulfillment of desire and
impulse.
For this satisfaction it is ready to face
the risk of destruction and the actuality of suffering; for what it is pushed by Nature to aim at is not self-preservation
alone, but life-affirmation and life-satisfaction, formulation of life-force
and life-being.