OUR EMOTIONAL NATURE & DESIRE –
THE VITAL BEING (The psychic prana)
Each instrument* has,
it has been said, a proper and legitimate action and also a deformation or wrong
principle of its proper action.
COMMENT: Each
instrument*: physical body,
physical prana, psychic prana, manas, chitta, buddhi, causal body.
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.
The Ananda (bliss) of the Spirit
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 sattvic enjoyment of the emotional mind
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
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, fulfilment 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
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, (asanti).
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.
Desire and will
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.
The intermediary parts of the antahkarana*
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.
COMMENT: antahkarana*: it is the inner fourfold instrument, what we call in the west mind. It has four aspects: Buddhi (intelligence, intellect), Chitta (subconsiousness, conditioned consciousness), Manas (outer mimd), Ahamkara (ego).
Attraction-Repulsion - Raga dvesa and
the pairs of opposites
The deformation of the emotional mind
hinges upon the duality of liking and disliking, emotional attraction and repulsion
(raga-dvesa,).
All
the complexity of our emotions and their tyranny over the soul arise from the
habitual responses of the soul of desire (soul of desire is the 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 (the desirous ego or soul of desire as
Aurobindo call it).
Pleasant- unpleasant
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-dvesa 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.
Right action of the emotional mind
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.
Discernment between the pleasant and
the good
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.
The inner heart - the soul of love
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
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
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.
