EWS #102 Affirmative and Active Purification + Q&A on Spiritual Life

Jan 22, 2022

Joel (0:00:58):
Hello, everybody. Welcome to our continuing series, Evenings with Sraddhalu. Greetings from Auroville. Namaste, Sraddhalu.

Sraddhalu  (0:01:10):
Namaste. Happy to be with you.

Joel (0:01:14): Let me just get the loop feedback here. So Alina won't be joining us tonight, she will join us next week. And we can continue this series with the following introduction. So earlier we studied the six perfections of Sri Aurobindo's Integral Yoga, and then we began to explore the means of attaining to these perfections. The first step is purification and Sraddhalu will continue further.

Sraddhalu (0:01:50):
Thank you. In our earlier discussions over the last few weeks, we went through the seven steps of the Integral Yoga, the six perfections which are the goal of the yoga, which are the comprehensive framework of the yoga and the seventh step which is the foundation and the means by which these six perfections are attained. This is the Siddhi Chatushtaya, the chatushtaya, that is the quartets of perfection, Siddhi. You will recall the four words in Sanskrit - Shuddhi, that is purification, which leads to Mukti, that is liberation, which leads to Siddhi, that is the perfection and finally the Bhukti which is the participation in the divine manifestation. Of this, the first step is Shuddhi - purification and Sri Aurobindo spends about three chapters in the Synthesis of Yoga on this topic. First, dwelling upon what this purification actually is, in what way it's different from our normal conception. Then, what are all the parts of our nature which need to be purified. And then from there, the actual means of purifying. He goes into enormous detail. So much detail that I feel I am doing injustice by trying to present this in a single session. But what I can say is I will offer only a broad indication of the direction of the practice itself and for those of you who really want to appreciate the full scope of what he presents, I would recommend that you read these three chapters directly in the Synthesis of Yoga. The first thing which we find in this explanation of Sri Aurobindo is that he takes a psychology which is far more profound, not only than modern psychology, but even far more profound than the conventional yogic psychology that you will find in all the texts, traditional texts, whether it is the Yoga Sutras of Patanjali or even the Bhagavad Gita or various other texts. Their primary focus is on the major parts but since the goal is not transformation, the fine nuances are not important. Sri Aurobindo has to make further distinctions because each of these has a distinct function in the divine manifestation and when we aim at transformation each of these has to be purified from the mixture of the others. At the same time, they are raised to its actual right working in the divine expression in life. So the nature of the psychology is also more complex and we have to appreciate why.

In the discussion last time, we had dwelt on a few important points, which I will remind because they are the basis on which the real appreciation of this practice can take place. The most important point was that we are spirit. We are eternal, infinite, blissful, Sacchidananda. And the power of Sacchidananda is to be able to concentrate itself on various poises that it can take, not only in its universal status, creating worlds in the process, but also in its individual status as a soul to concentrate on various poises. We are therefore Sacchidananda, concentrating to have a human experience. For which purpose, there are four instruments, our supramental vehicle, mental vehicle, life vehicle and physical vehicle. Of which the supramental vehicle is not developed yet, not organized at an individual level, although it exists as a cosmic level. So far in our evolution only the three lower ones have been reasonably organized, but because we have identified with this surface part of our mind-life body, we have as if forgotten that we are actually free, but we have never lost the freedom truly. We have only accepted a certain entrapment in this experience and having forgotten what it is like we struggle to remember. We saw also how Supermind is intimately close and secretly the base of everything that exists- all of our experiences, all of evolutionary experience, our minds working most intimately is rooted in the Supermind's powers and functions. Our life energies are supported and the whole life itself is possible because of the supermind and the physical consciousness, matter itself exists because of supermind. And we saw this last time, review that because we have to change our relationship with the supermind. Most of us for various reasons because of prior, I will say programming of education, conceive of spirit, supermind, Sacchidananda as things which are far away, difficult to attain. No, they are intimately ours, they are intimately the reality. They are the only reality. All this which we are engaged with is phenomenon. Layers of variation, ripples on the surface of supermind and sacchidananda. That is our truth. We are already that in our deepest, highest parts. And the memory of that is what acts as a nudge, making us want to grow, to find, to become and to be dissatisfied with what we are. So this is very important to review because it is critical that we change our relationship with the truth that we already are.

We saw also last time this dual status of the Purusha and Prakriti, the consciousness that can stand back and the energy of our nature, our nature as well as collective, universal Nature. And the relationship and the key to the awakening is the ability of our consciousness to lean further into identification with Nature or to lean back to disengage from identification. It's a very simple movement as we saw last time. We can lean into ignorance and ego limitation and therefore find ourselves more and more bound until we feel, ‘oh I am made of my body, without my body I wouldn't exist. I am separate, I'm cut off, I am limited’ or leaning back to the sense of wideness, freedom, the deeper truth of what we truly are. But because we are still rooted in Mind as our principal status of focus, we cannot get back to the true reality of Sacchidananda unless we as if withdraw from the mind and life and body. We have to be able to awaken through mind to this higher poise of supermind in which we can engage with life as well as live in Sacchidananda in continuum. And yet the mind is our starting point. And there Sri Aurobindo had given us the three intuitions by which the mind can learn to stand back as a witness, by which it can open to its own inner, wider, subliminal awareness, opening to universality through it, and then to open to something higher which is the supramental, the divine consciousness above which is the source and the template out of which the mind is formed. These three intuitions we dwelt on as principal means by which we prepare ourselves for this opening and yet until our basic machinery of our nature is sufficiently purified, we cannot really open out fully or receive the influence of the higher for an effective diviner action.

Sraddhalu (0:10:37):

And so the first necessity for us is the purification of our instruments, of our nature. Our soul, our consciousness does not need purification. It is already spirit,it remains always pure, not affected by the faults of our instrumentation. It's for the instruments that we need to purify. In the purification itself broadly we are aware of the mind, our emotional being - we will say the heart generally or the vital desire nature, as well as life in the body. These are the broad portions that we are conscious of but Sri Aurobindo will go much deeper as we will see. What is the nature of this purification? Sri Aurobindo spends some time to explain this and to distinguish from the conventional idea that comes largely from the ascetic tradition. In the ascetic tradition the idea of purity is to limit morally, ethically, limit in tendencies, habits, forms of life, forms of thought, even to the extent of forms of food and dress code and so on. But you will see the very character of the definition, the very nature of the purification is narrowing, fixing, binding into certain fixed rules. And especially when it comes to the moral and ethical, it changes from culture to culture, sometimes from age to age also. Sri Aurobindo points out that the whole approach there is to become more and more passive, quietistic, negative by withdrawal and that is the purity into which they lapse into a silence of the self to withdraw. But in the integral yoga, the goal here is very different because we want to actually increase action and make the action more powerful even, as we have already discussed in the six perfections.

And this mind, heart, life, body are meant to do the works of the divine. To be able to do all that you are already doing, but do much more, maybe a thousand fold more eventually to become a dynamo of the divine creative energy. And therefore, the negative, prohibitory, passive and quietistic purification can be at best a preparation. What is needed, Sri Aurobindo says, is a positive, affirmative, active purification and hence the title for today's session. To quote from Sri Aurobindo, “A divine quietism discovers the immaculate eternity of the Spirit. A divine kineticism adds to it the right, pure, undeviating action of the soul, mind and body”. So this is this other aspect, the divine kinesis, the divine dynamism and the purification that it needs to be able to act freely. That's really what we are primarily going to focus on. This purification has to be total because the nature of our human instrument is everything is interconnected with everything else. You cannot say I will purify one part, then another part, then another. As long as something remains unpurified because it's all bound it's going to influence and make impure. And that's one of the characteristics of the integral yoga that we don't go in small steps of sequence; simultaneously all the parts, yes, according to your nature, according to the day even and the situation, some will be more emphasised, others less. But we have to be clear that the full purification of this full complexity of the human instrument is our goal. And therefore, the narrow moral purification, [is] useful at best as a starting point. It does not mean, he says, that we go beyond, that we ignore the reality of good and evil. It's not that rising above beyond morality that you can be immoral or amoral. The idea is when the divine consciousness flows to act, it must have an instrument that is infinitely plastic, free of rigidities, boundaries and fixations. And then as the situation demands, it should be able to flow freely in response to that which is infinitely plastic and infinite potential. So obviously, any kind of rigidity of habit, even if a help in the beginning, later has to be dissolved. And I'm going to point this out to many of us who have been through some kind of an ascetic kind of preparation, purification. Yes, it was useful. But at some point you will have to consciously dissolve all rigidities. Otherwise, that very rigidity which you cling to will prevent higher and freer flow. Sri Aurobindo says free action of an eternal truth, an eternal might, an eternal love, an eternal ananda not bound to form. This is the direction.

Sraddhalu (0:16:10):

So, I give an example here. If you take just one of the moral purities associated with spirituality, which is not eating non-vegetarian food. Well, because you don't want to kill an animal. There are many spiritual traditions which don't care. They eat non-vegetarian. But if that is your case, the point though is those who have fixated their body into this morality often find themselves unable to digest things which have the hardness or character of meat. It may not be actually meat, but the body's inability to digest meat, it doesn't matter whether you eat or not. The point is you are unable to digest, you're unable to manage things which are heavy and rigid, that's an incapacity of the body. So it does not mean you have to start eating meat, but it does not mean either that if there is no food left except meat, let's say you are in the Neskimo land and you don't get your vegetables that you are unable to eat or you're unable to digest what is given. That's an incapacity and limiting to the true capacity and freedom. That's one example.

Another example would be our fixation with non-violence associated with spirituality. That how can a spiritual person take the sword and fight? Well of course he has to if he has to fight for a greater truth, as we have seen in situations in human history, to protect a greater truth, to fight to assert a higher principle over a lesser, coarser, even anti-evolutionary force. But if you are non-violent, to the point of a fault, you are unable to assert, unable to fight, well, you need someone else to defend you. This is the condition of most of the ascetic traditions. In practice, you see Gandhar of the Mahabharata fame which today is distorted to Kandahar in Afghanistan. The entire region was the seat of Buddhism for centuries. During the wave of Islamic invasions, it was entirely wiped out. To this day, the mountains of Afghanistan are known as the Hindu Kush. And you would wonder why the Taliban particularly and the extremist Islam, having destroyed the Bamiyan Buddhas and all symbols which are non-Islamic would still name their mountains Hindu Kush. Think about it. And the reason is simple because the word Kush means massacre. It's a memory of the massacre of all the Hindus and Buddhists which took place there and that's why they proudly still call them the Hindu Kush mountains. Who was there to defend those monks? Nobody. Think about it. The inability to stand up and fight in a battlefield by some kind of a limitation brought about by non-violence or even a weakness brought about by non-violence of a different kind led to this situation. So when a higher value acts, even if it needs to use the mould of violence, it should be able to freely use it.

And I will take an example of a soldier on the battlefield, when for example in 1972, there was a 1971, the attack from Pakistan on India and subsequently and before. Each time the attack started from the other side, there was a fundamental difference between the soldiers on both sides. To this day, the prime motivation of the soldiers on the Pakistani side is the inculcation of hatred against everything India. To this day, the primary motive of the Indian soldier is not hatred for Pakistan. It is love for your own motherland. If you remove the enemy of India, the Pakistani soldier has no drive, no motivation, because whom to hate now? He is not fighting for a truth, for a cause to stand upon. The other side is defending a cause which is so great that it is willing to give up its life. I am giving this as an example of how it's not the violence - on the battlefield you shoot or be killed, but it's the fundamental shift in poise which makes all the difference. And when the divine consciousness flows into life it has to flow by its higher values, act as necessary in a given situation with the full plasticity of the instruments ready to flow as necessary. Only then can you have a real divine life. The sattvic purity is good. It's not enough. You have to transcend even sattvic-ness and rajas and tamas. So all these are concepts that Sri Aurobindo brings in. I am not going into detail and it is just to give you a sense of the purity that he speaks of.

Sraddhalu (0:21:36):
The purification is liberation from inferior working. That is the first necessity. When we seek to have purity, he again points the method by which we approach it should not be by attaching to symptoms. Inhibition, regulation, formation, etc. are all symptoms. If you have not corrected the true cause, then you are covering up the symptom. And he says, “we have not to doctor symptoms of impurity”. You see what happens normally when you take to a traditional yoga system and they will say you should not lie, you should be kind, you should be compassionate, you should share and so on. There are many guidelines given. Each time you try to practise those, you are putting on a fake appearance. And I've actually seen this in various spaces, spiritual spaces. And it distinguishes the true master from the rest. A person  is tremendously angry and yet covers up with a facade of smile and affection and kindness and you can feel the anger behind that is heating and it's skillfully done and all they have done is created a layer of hypocrisy, there's no real transparency, because they try to live up to a certain form of ideal not the spirit of the ideal. And that's why Sri Aurobindo says not to attach to secondary signs but go to, he says, “we have to distinguish the formed parts of our being, find out their basic defect of impurity or wrong action and correct that, sure that the rest will then come right naturally”...”Strike at its roots after a deeper diagnosis”. So this is the process now which will happen. Observe all the parts and go to the root of impurities. Now Sri Aurobindo says very simply when you do this analysis, there are two sources of impurity; all else derived from these two. So rather than fighting 20 different kinds of emotions that you want to uncover, how many is it in Christianity? they speak of seven deadly sins. So while you're fighting one sin, another pops up, you fight that, another pops up. Forget all the sins and distortions of your nature. Go down to the first two basic root causes, work upon those and all the rest will fall into place. And this is the method of Sri Aurobindo, going down to the threads of the knot and unknotting, rather than fighting with symptoms.

So “two forms of impurity which are at the root of the whole confusion”. First, he says, I read, “One is a defect born of the nature of our past evolution, which has been a nature of separative ignorance”. So we have grown out of a separative divided consciousness and therefore everything that has emerged is shot through with the sense of division and separateness. “This defect is a radically wrong and ignorant form given to the proper action of each part of our instrumental being”. We'll see all the parts, but in each of these parts, there is a radically wrong form given to their proper action and an ignorant form given to their action. Why? From the simple fact that we came out from a divided consciousness and with a sense of isolation, fragmentation. Just as a very simple example, you will see the primary drives of our normal growth and learning which are used by the industrial system of education is this carrot and stick. Why? Because that's how we are driven by nature in some way. You have pain which is the stick beating you and pleasure which is the carrot attracting you. So you move in a particular direction. As long as you live by the pain pleasure powers then you can be programmed, you can be made to behave anyhow. Many interesting experiments of this kind which have been done in science. They implanted chips inside a monkey's brain to trigger pain pleasure and then associated certain behaviours with pain, certain behaviours with pleasure and very quickly the monkey was programmed. That's what is being done to you by the whole system of today. Or fear and insecurity combined on one side pushing you and then security offered as a reward if you follow. Punishment driving you, reward attracting you, loss, gain - these are all values we have grown out of from childhood and as part of our evolutionary mould. Perhaps one of the most powerful which shape our behaviour today is our sense of what others think of us, which we value more than what we feel ourselves to be truly and we shape ourselves to match what others expectations might be in order to gain their appreciation if we behave this way and thereby distort what we truly are. And these are so deeply rooted. You cannot truly be yourself, you cannot act freely, you cannot really enjoy life because of these tendencies which are so deeply rooted.

Sraddhalu (0:27:25):

Sri Aurobindo gives an example which is much more fundamental. These are more superficial examples I've given. He gives the one example, he says, “the proper function of the life, the vital force, is enjoyment and possession,” - Life force in you is always trying to enjoy, always trying to possess and this is its real function, “both of them perfectly legitimate because the Spirit created the world for Ananda, enjoyment and possession of the many by the One, of the One by the many and of the many too by the many”. This is the purpose for which spirit created the world. Think about it. Enjoyment is of three kinds. That the enjoyment and possession of the many by the One. The one divine consciousness fills everything, possesses everything, enjoys everything - this is one aspect. The other side is enjoyment of the One by the many; each one of us as a separate individual turns and enjoys the one Divine or the Oneness underlying reality. And in that Oneness we discover others. And the third, enjoyment of the many by the many, which is of course in its most superficial form the normal form of enjoyment that we seek, but in its superficial form, not in its true form. All three are legitimate and aspects of the divine delight and so he says the proper function of life force is this, to possess and to enjoy. But what happens, where is the distortion? “but, – this is an instance of the first kind of defect, – the separative ignorance gives to it the wrong form of desire and craving…”. Now you're enjoying what is given to you but instead of enjoying what you have, the impulse of separative ignorance says, but what about that thing which I don't have? Oh I don't have that but I want to enjoy that and then comes the craving and the desire rather than being able to enjoy what you have. So you crave that which you don't have, you don't enjoy what you do have, and in the craving itself, you have distorted the enjoyment of what you have, but also the enjoyment of what you don't have. And craving is the key word here, the form of desire that it takes.

And so I continue to read, “...wrong form of desire and craving which vitiates the whole enjoyment and possession and imposes on it its opposites, want and suffering”. So if I look at what I have and what I don't have is infinitely large. So between what I have and what I don't have, what would I do? I will suffer much more because of what I don't have, than be able to enjoy what I have. And all because of this false sense of separation. You remove that and experience the whole world as a continuum, as my home; everything is mine or created for my delight or I have created from my origin for the purpose of my delight as an individual. And everything is available to you for your delight. What do you do? Well, the first thing you do is you enjoy that which is in front of you, that which is already given to you, but you do not lack the sense that all that is not given to me. And so the delight can be, or the enjoyment can be a continuum and without the opposite of want and suffering. In fact, the whole nature of this want and suffering is precisely that it is infinite. So your demand also is infinite and then your suffering is infinite, if you follow that. So this is the first example, the division or separative ignorance creates the distortion.

The second example is or rather the second form of impurity now he gives. “The other impurity is born of the successive process of an evolution where life emerges in and depends on body, mind emerges in and depends on life in the body” and so on. Because the evolution was one sequence after another, each thing emerging from the previous has the habit of depending on its origin. So your mind for example, depends on the life energy and the animal instincts out of which it is emerging and the life instincts depend on the physical body and its drives out of which they have emerged. Your mind therefore depends on all these and is influenced by the dependence on their working. So the things they try to do -  they impose on mind or rather mind submits to them. So mind becomes tired when body is tired. Mind becomes passionately driven when the desire is unable to satisfy itself. The enjoyment seizes on the mental will. Where there would have been an enjoyment of the life energies in itself now it has got distorted as we saw by the first distortion - it is craving for what it does not have and the desire that it is seeking now enters the mind seizes on the mental will, the mental will is meant to act by a mind's clarity and thought, know what is right and act by what is right in understanding. Instead now the will is made the instrument of desire. Now I start directing my life purpose according to the moment's desire. And that's when the mixture caused by this dependence distorts. So I read again from Sri Aurobindo. “This second defect of our nature is caused by this dependence of the higher on the lower parts; it is an immixture of the functions by which the impure working of the lower instrument gets into the characteristic action of the higher function and gives to it an added imperfection of embarrassment, wrong direction and confusion”. If at this point the intuition were to enter into you, it would be subjugated to the mind, life, desire, etc. and distorted. And therefore, you will feel an intuitive sense, but the conclusion that it points to would be distorted because of your strong desire which wants a certain outcome. And so you would have the feel of the true intuition, but the error of the form of intuition. Unless you make your mind sufficiently pure, you cannot receive the true intuition. Isn't it? So, these are the two defects;  everything boils down to these two defects. And he says they pervade the whole of our nature, all across - every level, every part and if we can set them right, automatically there will be the purity, there will be the clarity of pure will, pure heart, pure emotions, pure enjoyment of vitality and pure body.

Sraddhalu (0:34:37)
How simple he makes it, isn't it? By going to the very root of everything. You don't have to fight seven deadly sins, you do not have to fight with 20 different situational problems and habitual tendencies and knots of your particular nature, reduce just to just these two. And so as a psychological process now, what do you have to do? First, to remove the distortion that comes from this artificial sense of separation. And second, separate out all the parts. Of course in practice it will be the reverse sequence. First, we will distinguish all the layers, separate them so that this mixture does not happen and then into each you will remove this artificial sense of ignorance or separative sense and as a result, the craving and distortions, for example in the life force would be released and freed and the same for other parts. And we will see what are all these parts that we have to work upon.

Sri Aurobindo now dwells on the psychology. He uses a lot of Sanskrit words because with this he links to the existing body of yogic knowledge but also because in the English language you do not have precise words with the precise connotations. Necessarily, I will avoid unnecessary Sanskrit words other than a first point of contact. I will avoid them because quite a large number of us are not familiar with those words and so it makes it more complex needlessly. The mind can absorb most easily when you listen in the vocabulary familiar to you. But if we define the terms carefully, then it should not be a problem. First, he explains that our gross body itself is made up of two different components. There is the material, the substance of the body itself and then there is the physical life force, prana. The prana fusing into the annamaya, that is the physical food sheath, life energy merging in the food sheath of physical matter, makes for this gross body which is also our outer instrument. In Sanskrit, the opposite part of this is the inner instrument. Outer instrument, inner instrument, very simple. The Sanskrit word is Antah Karana. Antah is inner, Karana the doer. Which is what you subjectively feel when you say I am the person who is using this body. Who is the user of the body? Me. Whose body is it? Mine. Who is this me versus the body? That's your mind awareness, primarily. So Antah Karana, the mind awareness primarily, and we'll now distinguish parts within it. That's your vehicle. Of you, the sense of I, inhabiting now this mix of gross physical body with a life force. Problem is each of these two statuses or these two parts of you has something which mixes with the other. In the life force in the body which is the prana, life energy, Sri Aurobindo uses the phrase now, psychic prana. Psychic not in the sense of the inmost psychic being as the soul, true soul within, but psychic in the Greek sense of the word, psyche, of an inner finer mental grade. So the life energy in the physical body has a certain density but its finer grade then permeates the whole of the mind and the antah karana, the mental awareness. Because that mental awareness has emerged in evolution out of the physical body and life force. So it is shot through, he says. The phrase he uses is “shot through” with the psychic prana. And remember that lack and craving and desire was in the life force and therefore the very substance of your mind is filled with this life energy which animates it on one side and at the same time fills it with this craving and desire. If you start trying to fix the way you think, to remove the desire in your thoughts, you will spend the whole of your life and have practically no result, unless you first separate out this influence of the psychic prana in the mind. The moment you have separated the two, well, half the problem is already gone. This primary drive of desire and sense of lack and craving is gone from the mind. The mind can look at itself and say, yo, I am free of the craving. Just like that. Just by separating. And then what do I want to do? I can choose freely.

Sraddhalu (0:39:30):

Then will come the other aspect of the purification. What is its true function? But you see, a very simple recognition, the fact that there was this mixture, if you can separate this, so much is achieved. And this separation in a practical way, that is in your operative normal life, which is 99% of your normal routine of life, you can attain to this basic separation easily by the process which is described in the Integral Yoga in a very short time. Now, I am emphasising very short without giving a number because, remember Sri Aurobindo attained to the Supramental Consciousness in five years. So what is very short for you depends on the kind of concentration of Tapas that you dedicate to the effort itself of the separation and purification. But it's very short, considering what is achieved for the effort made and for the time span that we have for our life. And I'm saying only on a practical level. It's not perfected. And it will not be perfected, that is absolute, until the supramental consciousness enters fully and takes charge. But a practical freedom, a practical perfection of their working is possible in a very short time. And that's enough for us at this stage. The rest, as we have seen, as we develop into the six perfections, those other influences come in and make it complete.

So the psychic prana creates the mixing into the mind. And the mind, remember, is also the seat of our sense of I, the ego sense. It says I am this person thinking. This combining creates what he calls “sensational desire-soul”. That's the sense of the ego you are. I am this person defined by my cravings, by my needs, by my desires and your intelligence, your ego are totally overpowered by this influence, but they have the capacity to separate, to free from the subjection of this vital, nervous and physical psychology. But this desire-soul which he has described here, the sensational desire-soul, he says, “this combination creates in us the sensational desire-soul which is the chief obstacle to a higher human as well as to the still greater divine perfection”. I want to highlight this because if you can work on this, you will have attained something so extraordinary that everything else becomes after that cake-walk, comparatively. And this is not difficult also because the means itself is so simple. There are two phrases he uses: chief obstacle to a higher human perfection as well as chief obstacle to the still greater divine perfection. The still greater divine perfection will happen with the higher consciousness beginning to fill you with the inner consciousness beginning to emerge. But the first level is the higher human perfection which is made purely by this purification, separation of these different parts and making the parts follow their true function. And the chief obstacle is this sensational desire soul. Get rid of this and all other obstacles will become so much simpler. That's why this highlight. But now we have to see what are the parts. So we have just looked at the first two, gross physical, Annamaya matter and the life force which then also extends into the mind. But what is this inner mind awareness made of? Antahkarana. And he uses here again the traditional vocabulary in Sanskrit. Chitta, Manas, Buddhi, Ahamkara. Having said this, I will now increasingly drop the Sanskrit terms.

Chitta is the substance of your mental awareness. When you say I'm conscious, I'm conscious of my body, I'm feeling my body, I'm feeling my space around me - just this sense of a continuum of awareness, which is in its quality of mental awareness, is your Chitta. Everything is filled with Chitta. And just as the life energy, psychic prana, goes from the physical body into the mental consciousness, so too the mental consciousness of Chitta fills and seeps down all the way into the life force and into the physical body. This particular layer is extremely important and we will come to this shortly. But otherwise the sense of chitta is this - I'm conscious. The sense of the quality of conscious awareness filling everything. Just aware. You're aware of the world, you're aware of things, you're aware of sensations, you're aware of body. It's all continuum of chitta. Basic mental consciousness is how Sri Aurobindo translates this word or stuff of mind in another context. The next part is manas which Sri Aurobindo defines as sense-mind. This is the part of the mind which has emerged out of the Chitta and out of the physical body which is primarily plugged into the senses, as if formed of the senses, as if living for the senses. If you remove the senses, suddenly this mind says, Oh, I'm in darkness. I have no sense of purpose. Plug back into the senses, Ah yes, now I'm living my life. It feels itself almost as a product of senses, but its primary purpose is turned to senses by habit. And as we will see later, it has actually the capacity to disengage from the physical senses and directly exercise its senses outside the physical body. So a key idea here is that the senses are actually a mental experience primarily. It is the manas infusing into the physical body by habit of prior evolution now bound into the organs of the physical body, - let's say the eyes, smell, taste, touch etc. plugged into those organs and their channel of nerves we feel as if, if I close my eyes I cannot see anymore. Only by habit, the manas, sense-mind, is plugged into the eyes for sight. By habit it translates what comes through the eyes nerves as sight and what comes to the ears nerves as sound. If you look at it purely from a biological way, the ears and the eyes all feed in into the same part of the brain or associated relative parts and between them there are connections. So the signals are all cross-connected at some point. In fact there are very simple brain defects where you knock this part connecting and you hear colours and you see sounds because of this cross connection. That means the actual seeing and hearing is not taking place in the brain. It takes place in the sense mind which plugs into the brain and this is called the sixth sense in the Yoga terminology because it's the only true sense. In fact the five senses are its specialisations, derivations from the only sense which is sense mind, manas. Because it's primary sense, its primary job is to interface with the world, it can disengage from the physical body senses and connect, plug into direct experiences of other things. When it does that, then we have a lot of psychic phenomena of which Shri Aurobindo makes reference here. In fact, he goes into some detail on this, describes how experiences of clairvoyance, clairaudience, that is seeing from far and hearing from far, telepathy etc. Most of these ordinary occult powers are properly happening on this level of the sense mind only. They do not require any higher ranges of consciousness. In a way they imitate certain powers of the higher ranges through this operation which is always sense mind.

Sraddhalu (0:48:02):
In fact, if you, he gives this example, if you focus on hearing carefully, you hear something which is happening just outside your room, extend to something farther away and extend to farther away. There's a point where there's no physical support left and you're still hearing at a great distance. And the same with sight. And this is the basis of remote viewing and various other things which are all part of our normal capacity, not developed because we ignored it by prior habit of evolution. As we grew up as children, our education further bound us into these parts and if we could have trained children at an early stage, children before the age of 12 easily develop clairvoyant powers effortlessly. Sometimes within days you can awaken those powers. And there are many people playing with that today. So I suppose that's an indication of the future trend of education. But this is to say that the sense mind is now the next layer of this. Above this, and we will learn to distinguish between this and this next layer, which is buddhi, which is the intelligence proper. We tend to confuse intelligence with the sense mind. But Sri Aurobindo will take great pains to separate the two because the buddhi is a power, a faculty in itself, a level of functioning and a grade of consciousness fundamentally different from the sense mind. But right now in the evolution it is only half emerged. It's still bound in the sense mind. Which is the reason why our thought power or intelligence itself is always compromised by our sensations as well as our emotions and life energy desires. If you can separate that sufficiently it can come into its own but general human evolution has not made that separation, it's made half separation. He says we have to complete it and we can do it easily because we are now sufficiently conscious human beings. In fact the elite of humanity and I mean elite in consciousness always have this sufficiently separated that they can turn upon the sense mind and say, ah I don't like the way I'm thinking, the way I'm feeling and change behaviour. If you cannot do this you have a stage that makes you worthy of being called higher grade in human evolution. Not even with a spiritual opening, just as a human individual.

And above this or emergent out of this is the sense of ahamkara which Sri Aurobindo translates as ego idea. The Sanskrit word is very suggestive because aham is I, kara is the action, doer. The sense of I-doer, ego idea, rises out of buddhi because we have an intelligence out of which this ego idea emerges sitting on top as the prime driver of a separate individuality. If you have not developed your intelligence sufficiently, your sense of ego identity is also very weak and subject to emotional sentimentality, not reasonable, independent in itself. Now quite a large part of humanity is still has an ego sense but the ego is not sufficiently emerged because the intellect is not sufficiently separated. Such people are easy to manipulate with emotions. They will talk rationally, but their prime driver is an emotion. They will throw keywords to justify their actions. And the next moment, if you challenge them with a completely opposite set of facts, they will turn around and justify their action now with a completely different argument, not realising that they have just contradicted themselves. They're not even conscious. Because this buddhi, intelligence, has not sufficiently emerged out of the sense mind and so everything is victim to emotions. Now you see why it is so important to separate out these layers. Not only in separating you remove all the confusion, you allow those layers to act on their own but you can also amplify and make more perfect each of these layers and their functions. So here we have the buddhi and the ahamkara ego, intellect and ego on top of the sense mind and the stuff of mental consciousness. Of these the lower two parts, sense mind and stuff of consciousness permeate all the way into the emotional, physical, life energies, all the way down into the physical body also and so there is this in-mixture of both parts. This is extremely important because this basic stuff of consciousness, chitta, is largely subconscious but it is also automatically perfect in its subconscious functioning. All of our memories are happening in the subconscious chitta. The more active part of the chitta is the memory where you are trying to remember, where you've paid attention so you remember and you are able to call back from the underlying store. But if you have not paid attention you have difficulty in calling back. But the knowledge is still there. Every little detail of every single thing that has happened to you ever in your entire life is recorded perfectly in this subconscious chitta. Under hypnosis you can be made to recall anything.

Sraddhalu (0:53:45)
But this subconscious chitta, because it is fixed into the vital and physical, is also the repository of the habits of the vital and physical. And this is a very significant observation. He uses the phrase submental memory because you're not mentally conscious and yet it is a part of the mental consciousness. Submental, as a memory seeps into the vital and physical. There you have all the bundles of habits patterns which you have developed not only since childhood in your current evolution but in the universality of the chitta which has its own universal extension - you have the mass of habits developed by Nature. This is extremely important and I'm going to read a line from Sri Aurobindo where he develops this: “Even, the whole constitution of our life and body may be described as a bundle of habits formed by the past evolution in Nature and held together by the persistent memory of this secret consciousness that is chitta. For chitta, the primary stuff of consciousness is like prana and body, universal in Nature but is subconscient and mechanical in nature of Matter”. So this chitta goes all the way into matter. It is the sense of consciousness in matter but at that grade it is subconscient and mechanical and that is where the persistent memory of Nature's evolution is held. Why is it that your biology follows specific steps and rhythms? Because of that past memory held in the species consciousness. If you deviate from it by an intervention on a genetic level, the persistent memory habit pattern tries to pull back to its old habit as a way of protecting all that it has built up over millennia, not even that, over billions of years of Nature's evolution. And this goes all the way to the level of the atom. You will see in the atoms, in the periodic table, all the lower levels of atoms are stable. As you approach the higher ranges, uranium and so on onwards they are all unstable. Why? Because Nature has formed those at a later stage of her physical evolution and not yet to develop the habitual stability on those levels. So they are easy to break because they're unstable. Think about it. That means in our biology also the lower gradations of the biology are the most rigid or stable. The higher emergent parts are least stable because not yet formed into a habit. But also in consciousness more aware and therefore unable to be rigidified. And so you understand how our nature is formed and connecting to universal Nature and it is this thing Chitta which is the thing which bridges and unifies. It is the repository of all past tendencies and habits and our entire constitution of life and body is made of those habits.

Now comes the most important part. Remember upon this Chitta there is theManas, sense mind and upon that is the intellect, buddhi and the ego sense. This intellect and ego sense can disengage as we saw relatively easily from the sense mind but from that poise of disengagement it can turn upon the sense mind and change the sense mind and the stuff of mental consciousness. Change those habits, modify them, reprogram them and with not too much difficulty, once you have access to those ranges. The problem is you don't have access to those ranges because they're subconscious to you. So you can tap the surface part of that range of chitta, manas, which is barely conscious and there you can reprogram your habits, which is what we do all the time. You learn to play a musical instrument, your fingers go wrong, you pause, consciousness is infused, the finger made to move in the right way and then once it gets the new habit, you withdraw your awareness and now the finger moves habitually. You just reprogram the habit in the fingers. Isn't that simple? Exactly the same process you could turn upon and make conscious.

Sraddhalu (0:58:20):

And I'm going to give an extreme example here. You have a movement here called the peristaltic movement. You take some food and chew and automatically it gets swallowed. There's a chain reaction of one muscle squeezing to push the food down, then the next squeezes, then the next, then the next, then the next and the food is made to push down. There is equally a programmed response. If you touch the base of the tongue, there is a reverse of the peristalsis. From the stomach, there's a ripple that rises up to push food up. That also nature has programmed. But it's rarely used in your life consciously, but it is subconscious. It's called the gag reflex. Also the vomit reflex. Both are there, but the dominant habit is the swallow. Trigger here, it swallows. Trigger in a different part, it pops up. And Nature uses that when necessary. Now there's a technique which is taught in stage magic and Houdini, if you have ever heard the name, was one of the famous escape artists, he learnt this. And as a child I was fascinated by the whole exercise of how it's taught. One of the things he would do because he had to escape, he would be completely bare, naked, tied in chains and find a way to get out of it. One of the techniques he used was he would take a master key and swallow it and then pull it out of his stomach when he wanted and with his mouth open with the master key the locks. So you could check his whole body he has nothing but the key is sitting in his stomach and he can pull it up at will. How would you do that? Tell me. The moment you swallow it's gone, you cannot reverse it. Has it ever happened to you as you start swallowing, you find it's a little too big, the piece by mistake while talking you swallowed and it's on the edge and you are able to somehow prevent it from being fully swallowed to be brought back? Just that tiny bit of awareness exists there where you can stop it from being swallowed before it crosses the peristaltic limit of habit,

now if you can.

So the technique for this I will describe to you in summary. You take a piece of small potato, tie it with a string and then you hold it at the base of the mouth and hold there and half swallow and then pop it back, half swallow, pop it back and make that portion conscious. Once you have done that you can take it a little further and again pop it out. Take it a little further, pop it out. And if at any point by mistake you swallow the whole thing, it goes down, well, it's a boiled potato, your string pulls out, no problem. You start with the next piece. Now you see, observe the method is exactly the same as you did for the finger training. You made a part conscious and then popped out. And bit by bit you are able to take it more and more until there's a point where suddenly now the entire range of the peristaltic movement opens up to your consciousness. And he is able to swallow the potato halfway, stop and reverse, regurgitate. Take it in fully into the stomach and regurgitate. Or stop it halfway and regurgitate. How long does it take? I don't know. I think it's a question of a few days or weeks. Because in many circus acts, they teach you this. In the circus acts, where they stick a sword into the throat and pull it out, they teach you to block the gag reflex. Now, the reflex never truly goes away. It is still there and the body can vomit if it wants to. You can still trigger it by touching the base of the tongue. But you have now acquired an overriding power of the conscious mental will, your buddhi, intelligence, on this chitta-manas base combination in the body energy complex, by which when you put the will, that particular impulse is subdued or set aside and a new impulse is formed. And you could even completely erase an impulse or leave it or the body protects it as a emergency reflex and that's it otherwise you are now completely in control of the entire swallowing process. Not difficult, very quick to achieve and in principle by a similar process you could percolate from above from your less conscious parts and go deeper deeper into the subconscious.

In fact there's a much more direct technique used for achieving the same thing and that is done with hypnosis where somebody else's will intervenes, removes your surface mind, surface consciousness, taps into an inner range and then gives the suggestions which are then followed by this chitta and manas at an inner subliminal level. And you can reprogram habits just like that. You can get rid of fears overnight. All kinds of phobias can be just thrown out just like that with a suggestion. And there are various methods of doing it. But essentially it is this idea that somebody else's intelligence or higher level of consciousness now enters, taps into this range which is otherwise unconscious to you and puts a suggestion to modify. That's it.

Sraddhalu (1:03:40):

So Sri Aurobindo's point is the whole constitution of our life and body is a bundle of habits and it can be reprogrammed entirely. So now we understand the power of this and the importance of separating. Currently our relationship is reversed. The intelligence is subjugated to the sense mind and the emotions and the life energy is the psychic prana and the desire soul. If you could extract it separately enough it could turn around and modify all those. That's going to be our key for purification. And then comes the sense of I, ego sense which is individualised above the mind but I got into this whole discussion because in most people, in a mass of humanity it is still this psychic prana, life force in the emotions, which is the focal point of the ego sense also and so such people can be easily manipulated and they have the illusion of freedom but they can be played with easily by sentimental suggestions, sentimental sentimental images, sentimental sympathy which binds them and makes them act irrationally and use the intelligence to justify irrational and completely contradictory movements. Mass of humanity is in this and I would very politely say most of us are the victim of this if not we are fully in it. And to recognise this and to correct for this is a critical part of this correction, the separation of these parts. We have to be able to pull ourselves into pure self-aware intelligence free of the emotions. And then only we can turn around and modify those patterns. “In fact”, he says, “all action of the mind or inner instrument arises out of this chitta”. Chitta vritti - in the classical yoga of Patanjali, it is called “chitta vritti nirodha is yoga”, – to be able to still those tendencies is yoga. It is a very reductionist generalisation, but you can take it as an important stage of the emotional mind, what we call my heart, are habits. There is no true compulsion, there are only habits. All can be reprogrammed by this intelligence freed from here.

I want to dwell on this a little more because this emotional mind is so commonly confused with the real sense of I. Sri Aurobindo makes it a point that even, he says, in the vernacular in Indian languages they will use the word prana and chitta to say me. This prana, this jiva, this chitta, this individual, this heart, this soul. This in English we will say a good soul, my heart says this. No, that's not you. That's your emotional sentimental desire soul, psychic prana mixing in to create this illusion of an I. So many people, so many people are stuck in this even in a spiritual life and confuse this with the psychic. Unfortunately the English language does not have a word to distinguish. There's a word we use called feel. What do you feel? Feel can have at least three different connotations. I feel hot or cold on my skin. I feel happy or I feel sad. Still feel. And the deeper psychic intuition also is feel. So the moment I say, what do you feel? I don't feel like doing it and that's your desire soul. No, no, I mean your deeper feel. Deep inside in this very sentimental part, I would rather avoid doing this work. Because I'd rather be happy and cool and relaxed and live in inertia.  Feel. But it's not the psychic feel. Unless you get rid completely of all the disturbance in the emotions, completely still the passions and the desire nature, you will not be able to feel the true psychic. And so again I read from Sri Aurobindo: “And yet the true emotive soul, the real psyche in us is not a desire-soul, but a soul of pure love and delight; but that, like the rest of our true being, can only emerge when the deformation created by the life of desire is removed from the surface and is no longer the characteristic action of our being”. As long as that thing is the characteristic action that you are living most of your life just from this desire soul and life of desire, you will not be able to have the experience of the psychic influence in its purity emergent. Even if it comes as a nudge, it will be mixed with your desire-soul and you will take that as the psychic guidance, which will be an error. “To get that done”, Sri Aurobindo says, “is a necessary part of our purification, liberation, perfection”. And so this nervous action of the psychic prana is most obvious in this purely sensational mentality which people confuse to be the true you, even your ego sense or even your psychic being or its influence. And we have to be very clear about this and very strict to be free of it. Because it is the same psychic prana and the sensational mentality which is basis for fear, anger, lust, and vital cravings and desires, which is really the root of the problem. Isn't it? The biggest hurdle, he said.

Sraddhalu (1:09:46):

But this higher will of the mind can replace the craving of desire by a higher sense of purpose. This craving of desire should not be our prime driver. It should be the higher will which has to be the prime driver. Nor should the higher will be subjugated to the craving of desire. Separate the two. Let this enjoy, let that guide. Life force will enjoy, intellect will guide with clarity and drive the will with higher freedom of choice. So, the craving and the desire have to be cleared. They have also been identified in Western psychology particularly as our prime drivers. You remove desire and you'll have no sense of purpose. No, in fact, it is the mind with a clear will that is the true driver of our sense of purpose in the surface parts and the psychic will to delight which is the true driver from our spiritual parts. And Sri Aurobindo speaks of this he says and I read a few lines here: “hungers, thirsts and lusts of the mind”, he said, “...the hunger of an infinite being”. “Desire”, he says, “is the root of all sorrow, disappointment and affliction”....”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”.

So you want to purify? Start this. But for this, separate the parts. Let the mind be now the rider and the life force, the obedient instrument. And it is allowed to enjoy, it must enjoy, it is your vehicle to enjoy. But it is not going to be the driver of your will and choice. You will choose and this will enjoy. But you as conscious mental intelligence. So, “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”. Now you can have a kind of a mental enjoyment that is a very refined and I will say even abstract kind of mental enjoyment of all these things including cuisine, like gourmet cuisine. You take, you taste and it's all in a highly refined part of the mind. But this psychic prana gives to it a certain physical tangibility of contact and an intimacy in the domain of form, which is different from intimacy of the psychic. But in the domain of materiality, it gives a certain closeness and it's necessary for the completion of the material experience. But now refined, purified, liberated psychic prana, life energy. Filling mind, filling the body, but separate in its function, not asserting itself on the other higher parts. So you reverse, you free the prana of desire and reverse the priority. Which rules, which leads? And in the ascetic tradition, this is the precise part because this is the problem area that they try to kill and suffocate by suppression. And the result is there is a kind of a loss of enthusiasm of life, loss of enjoyment of life, with it comes a loss of drive, of passion in the action also. But they kill the force of life by which a large part of your whole nature is sustained. And so those people tend to become more deflated, depressed or weakened in some way, even in life force, even in health eventually.

But if you want to bring the real motive power of life as the higher poise, then you have to distinguish between these two things. So again, I'm going to read. “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”, -within you the deepest impulse is delight and the will to delight, “and the enjoyment of the satisfaction of craving is only a vital and physical degradation of the will to delight”. And now comes the guideline for us. “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”. This separation is essential. If you cannot do that, you will always fall into this trap.

Sraddhalu (1:15:34):

One of the ways by which you do it is by bringing stillness into all these parts. The moment you've stilled the parts, it's easy to separate them and easy to distinguish their functions and easy to shift their relationship. The stilling can be done in various ways and the easiest way which we have been discussing several sessions before is the opening to the peace and the divine Presence above to bring down its aspect of Peace in particular. With it, all these parts become entirely still, clear, quiet. You can feel, you can distinguish, you can begin to work and then change the rhythm and pattern of their habit, new-form, new-create habitual patterns. If by then you have made this clear separation of the mind, and we will see how to do this shortly. You have clearly separated your intelligent will. You can turn up on all these parts and now modify them, modify their patterns. So I've already spoken of the manas, sense-mind and its ability to reach out beyond physical senses, physical limits. There are many interesting examples I could have given but I'll have to cut short this part of the discussion. But I'll just give one interesting example because it is so dramatic. The ability of the sense-mind, by habit, it fixes on the physical body, but actually it can open to anything. I'll give you an example here. You try to feel your finger. Just take the index finger and try to feel it until you're fully identified with the finger and its sensations. And the moment you're fully identified there. Imagine if someone took a hammer and went whack on your nails. Instantly as you feel the contact of the hammer, your finger tends to twitch and pull back. Interesting. Now the same thing could be done if you're shown a picture of your finger. Your physical finger is now hidden from you and you're shown a picture of your finger and someone tickles the finger in the picture. At the same time someone else tickles the finger physically. Very quickly the sense mind now fixates on the visual finger seen which is a rubber piece not a physical finger. Then you take a hammer and whack it. You actually feel the sensation because your sense-mind had attached to the rubber finger and this is one of the illusions they play with in the laboratory. How easily it is to shift the focus of the sense-mind. It's only by habit that we identify with our physical body and so a lot of possibilities exist there for its development, but the purpose of sense-mind is organising sense experience and to that extent it is common to the animal mind. What makes us different is the ability for it to separate itself even from the sensations and turn around and change the value of the sensations. So for the animal this is good, that is bad by a habit. For the human, I can say, I don't like this, but I'm going to learn to like it. I like that or I have an attachment to it and I am going to learn to disengage from that attachment and I can modify the sense values.

So the sense-mind although now linked through the life energies with the physical body can actually turn around and change its values. Who does the changing? It will still be the buddhi, the intelligence which now takes the sense mind, separates it, modifies it. But our sense-mind is to that extent more developed than the animal for this purpose. So all the deformations associated from these mixtures and their limitation which have come in the evolution, all these have to be perfected including the sense-mind and then finally the buddhi which is going to be our key to make this change and I will end with this, because we will have to discuss the further stages of the completion of purification and the consequent liberation the next time. But the means which we will use will be the buddhi.

And I'm going to describe the method here. You are identified with your body with your emotions, your sentiments, your life energy, desire-soul, your thoughts - you can distinguish these part by part as if, generally. But then the part of the mind that stands back and says what do I want to give as values to these things, what is important for me, this is the part which can now as if extricate itself from all these and as if pull back; so you have the sense mind, sense awareness, substance of awareness and you as if pull out, pull yourself out until you feel yourself as a focal point of pure intelligent thought, will, awareness. Free of all these and you pull yourself like this. It's a simple movement of pulling to separate. We touched upon it last time but you complete this movement. But now this time you will do it in conscious separation from emotional, sentimental, desire soul and sensations and the physical body. If you can disengage part by part or just disengage with all of it in one go and hold your poise in this, separate. This sufficiently liberated intelligence is going to be a starting point.

Into this, Sri Aurobindo makes three stages of distinction, for which there are no existing terms in any system of yoga. So he has to create his own vocabulary. The lowest of these, we realise, is the part of the intelligence that gives habitual values to everything: this is good, that is bad, this I am habituated, this I like, this I don't like, useful, not useful, important, not important. It's the lower part of the intelligence. You disengage from this also. And now comes the layer of intelligence which is the part that says, I will engage with all this. The will in the intelligence which will change, modify, act, choose, will. So this is the intelligence turned as will. You disengage from this part of the need to do and act and come into pure intelligent awareness which is knowledge only. I know, I want to know, I want to grow in knowledge and out of that will come the layer which engages the will to act. Out of that will come the layer which have the conventional values, habitual associations. Distinguish between these three layers of your intelligent will, buddhi and separate them also. Come into, successively through these stages, into this highest poise. Stay in it, hold it, hold the poise. When you do this over a few days, and I can say this it's not difficult, within a few days by doing persistently for a while every day, you will distinguish between these three layers so easily you will be able to shift between them. Ah, interesting and it's a qualitative difference. You'll be able to separate from your emotions and tendencies and find, ‘it's interesting, I'm not bound to that’. And then you will be able to reprogram your values. Try to do this with food. Take something which you're particularly attracted to and attached to or desirous of and change that relationship of desire, craving, remove the craving just like that, just by willing it, by choosing to and putting a new value to it. Hereafter I'm going to feel this, look at it as whatever it is. I did that once when I found I had a craving for sugar which I had to struggle with and I needed to cut back on sugar. So I took the taste of sugar and while tasting it, the mind turning upon this sensation, feel it as if something you don't like. Feel it as something almost bitterish, something almost distasteful and very quickly suddenly you find it distasteful and that's it. Now you hold that as an intention, thereafter suddenly it's gone. Each time I take sugar, it's like, oh that's not so nice, too strong, too sharp, distasteful, gone. The craving was reversed into a dislike. Now it's not our best way.

Sraddhalu (1:24:06):

The best way would be an equality, which is going to be really the first step of the perfections. But it just shows you how easy it is to reprogram. The same thing could be done with a single command under hypnosis by somebody else's will. But here as a yogic process, you take the responsibility to reprogram the values which belong to these domains - of the lower ranges of buddhi as well as the sense-mind and the general stuff of consciousness and life energy and thereby indirectly even change the body's associations and habits. In this sense, this poise of intelligence that we stand back in our highest poise, Sri Aurobindo says, “The “I” can then be seen as a mental reflection of the Self, the Spirit, the Divine, the one existence transcendent, universal, individual in its multiplicity; the consciousness in which these things meet, become aspects of one being and assume their right relations, can then be unveiled out of all these physical, mental coverings” and then from here it would open to something still higher which would then replace the proper working of your intelligence by a supramental intelligence. So he says, “When the transition to supermind takes place, the powers of the Buddhi do not perish, they have all to be converted to their supramental values”.

So now we have two movements we have to work upon consciously. Double movement, separating from the lower and then opening to the higher. They are different movements, work on the first and then complete with the second. And then bit by bit, the opening to the second will be parallel and will be assisted from above in the separation of the lower or even the influence of the higher will then flow into the lower which have been sufficiently separated that you can act upon them more and more directly invoking a higher influence upon them. So there is the release of the prana and the psychic prana and its craving and desire nature. There's the release from the chitta and its habitual tendencies, release from the manas and its formal values fixed by past habit that we free ourselves from, freeing of the intelligence from these different parts and separating of the three layers within them and opening to something higher still or deeper as an influence. Recall the exercise of the three intuitions from last time. You can merge into this very conveniently and with this drawing upon conscious opening of these parts to invoke the Divine Mother's consciousness, energy, her love, her light, her peace into all these parts which will then complete what you are unable to do with just your willful effort.

As I said before, the descent of the peace very easily assists in the separation but you have to complete the process by putting an intention of separating and stilling and changing their habitual forms. So I think this would be a good summary of the nature of this affirmative and positive purification in the Integral Yoga, the scope of it and the means by which we will attain to it. As I said, it's not even a summary of the three chapters. You really want to appreciate how detailed and in-depth Sri Aurobindo goes and the scope of this, read those chapters. But with this, we have at least got a basic form of practice in which to take our further steps. And then the next time we will dwell upon the consequent liberation and the scope of that liberation, which again on a very practical level we can access in our practice. We can take a few moments to concentrate, to assimilate all the large picture as well as the sense of purpose and the form of practice that we want to put this into with help of the divine energy, the Divine Mother, the divine Shakti.

Sraddhalu (1:28:41):
Thank you.

[Joel]

Thank you.