On the Nature of the Psychic
N. Asokan
There is a statement in the book The Secret that the divine presence
within is the picture of perfection. To the extent any human being adores that
perfection that same perfection will manifest also on the outer surface of his
life. What The Secret calls the
divine presence is simply the Psychic being as defined by Mother and Sri
Aurobindo. It is full of joy, love,
bliss and sweetness and the lives of all those people who give full respect to
this divine presence are bound to become joyous and blissful and sweet beyond
expectation. The inner psychic joy and sweetness can translate itself on the
outer physical plane as abundant prosperity, perfect health, harmonious
relationships and ever increasing accomplishments.
Those who honor this divine
presence must come forward to change and reshape their outer life in such a
manner as to facilitate its emergence on the surface. If we decide to lead a
life full of truth, purity, honesty, harmony, self-giving, love, courage and
thirst for perfection, surrender, silent-will and gratitude, its emergence on
the surface will be accelerated to that extent.
This divine presence is our true
self and not the false outer ego. If we
vacate the outer ego and make this inner presence take over the reins of our
life, it will act with lightning speed and help us accomplish in a day what would
require a year for normal people. It shifts us from the plane of time to
timelessness, from the finite to the infinite, from the part to the whole, from
the linear to the global, from the sequential to the simultaneous, and from the
outer to the inner. All these higher level shifts make the impossible become
possible in our lives.
Its intense waves of love and joy
have the power to dissolve our past karma and thereby liberate us from such
karmic consequences as ill-health, chronic poverty, and continuous failure. It
can attract opportunities that loom on the distant horizon and pull them
towards us and turn them into immediate practical realities. Size is not a
problem for the power of the Psychic. It can mobilize money in lakhs, and crores as easily as it
can in hundreds and thousands. It can give prosperity to a whole group of
people as easily as it can to a single person.
When a person lives in the
Psychic consciousness, the inner is the only reality and the outer is simply
the result. In other words, the inner is
the cause and the outer is the result. In ordinary life it is simply the other
way round. An ordinary man will demand that he must have money first and then
only he will become happy. For him money is the cause and joy is the result.
But for the person living in the Psychic consciousness, the joy he feels brings
him all the money he needs. That is, joy is the cause and money is the result.
The Psychic consciousness is much
wider than the narrow egoistic consciousness and therefore its sense of
responsibility is also much wider. Therefore a psychic person will feel
inwardly responsible for all that happens to people around him as he
understands that they are also part of his wider self. He takes the
imperfections in their lives as signs of his own imperfections. Therefore, he
will try to correct in himself what corresponds to their imperfections. This he will do silently without criticizing
them for their faults and imperfections. This is one dimension of his wider
consciousness. The other dimension is that what he gets by virtue of his wider
consciousness will spread to all others around him by the law of the same
wideness. In other words, if he is rich,
healthy, happy and progressing, all those who relate to him with good will will
get the same things simply by extension. The Psychic aura he radiates will
establish a subtle positive atmosphere around him and all those who enter that
subtle zone will be energized by that whether they know him or not.
The Psychic emerges only by a
process of continuous surrender and aspiration. It is up to the person
concerned to either take notice of his psychic or ignore it. This is not the
case with the ego or our desire self. Neither our ego nor our desires will
allow us to ignore them. They will remind us of their presence constantly and
insist on us satisfying them. Such insistence is not natural to the psychic. It
gives a free choice to the person concerned to either honor the psychic
aspiration or reject it and lead his normal way of life. Once the person takes
active steps to cultivate the psychic and manages to bring it to the surface,
then it will be a wise move for him to let it govern his life and not go back
to the rule of his ego and his desire-self. That would be a tragedy that cannot
be described in words.
Some people have had accidental
encounters with their psychic being without doing any conscious yoga. People
who have injured themselves in accidents and sick people who have reached the
last moment of their lives by being pronounced as hopeless by doctors come
under this category. Their encounter with the psychic enables them to come back
in to their bodies and continue living. Sometimes this reversal happens even
after the person has been pronounced clinically dead. This makes us understand
that the psychic has a death defying capacity. All such people uniformly
describe that they pass through a dark tunnel before they encounter a brilliant
ball of light. They describe the light as brilliant but not dazzling. The ball
of light communicates with them in a non-verbal manner. They know that it is
asking them questions but the questions are not in
words. Once they tell who they are and how they have come out of their bodies
and what they were doing in their lives, it gently advises them to go back into
their bodies and carry on with their lives. It gives them energy to get back into
their bodies also. Many of them say that the ball of light radiates such love
and joy and peace that they do not want to miss all that by going back into
their bodies. They also say that in a few seconds their entire past life flashes
before them as if on a screen without missing one detail.
If these are the benefits some
people have received by accidental encounter with their psychic being, how much
more benefits will come to those who take conscious efforts to connect with
their psychic and bring it out. The Mother has said in her Agenda that one full year of non-stop aspiration and remembrance
can help a person locate his psychic being. While She
was living in a
What is possible for normal
spiritual aspirants is to cultivate a steady spiritual aspiration that is
strengthened by an equally steady consecration of all our activities big and
small. This may be nowhere near the non-stop one year effort described by The
Mother in her Agenda. Still this will
help us gain an access to the Psychic in a reasonable period of time such as a
decade or so. This positive effort needs to be strengthened by a simultaneous
effort to remove all those negative qualities that stand as big boulders
blocking the door to the psychic. These negatives include such tendencies as
lying, jealousy, greed, anger, laziness, sexual desire and such other unwelcome
tendencies in our personalities. Though these are undesirable qualities,
persons exhibiting such qualities are very fond of them and cling to these
tendencies as if these were treasures. This endorsement and identification with
their own lower self makes the lower self become immensely powerful and thereby
act as a big block in the way of the psychic opening. It requires a very great
effort for the person to detach himself from his lower self. Once he detaches
himself the lower self loses all its powers and can be simply pushed out by the
strength given by a sincere spiritual aspiration. What people find very
difficult is to give up their love of their own lower self. They enjoy their
lower self and all that it gives them and it is very much like a buffalo that enjoys lying in the
muddy pool. The owner of the buffalo sees the muddy pool as something dirty and
repellent. But that is not how the buffalo sees the muddy pond. To the buffalo
the mud and the dirty water are simply divine elements to be enjoyed. It is
very difficult for the owner to convince the buffalo that enjoying the mud bath
is not good and that the buffalo should seek after the good clean water that he
can provide. The only thing he can do is to forcibly pull the buffalo out of
the mud pond by tugging on the rope attached its neck and then lead it to the
fresh water pond that he can provide. The buffalo may enter the fresh water
pond or it may break loose from the owner’s hold and head for its old mud pond
that it loves so much.
We human beings are in a similar
situation. Our higher Self is like the owner of the buffalo. We are the
buffaloes and our lower self is the mud pond. We love to wallow in our lower
self as much as the buffalo loves wallowing in the mud. We simply do not
understand that our lower self is something to be given up any more than the
buffalo understands that its mud bath is making it dirty. We enjoy our lower
self as much as the buffalo enjoys its mud bath since in both cases the
identification is total. At least the owner of the buffalo has the power to
pull the buffalo out of the mud. Our higher Self does not have the right or
authority to pull us out of the muddy waters of our lower self. It can only
stand at a distance and watch and wait and hope that some day we will have an
awakening that helps us detach ourselves from the lower self and come seeking
for our higher self. Till then it has no choice.
It is one of the mysteries of
nature that the psychic which is the highest part of our nature is also the least
assertive and dominant part of our nature. The lower triad of our nature
comprising the mind, vital and body is very assertive and insistent. Their
assertion is so total and their hold is also so total that we take our lower
self to be our whole self and become oblivious of the higher indwelling divine
presence. Weakening the hold of the lower self and strengthening the claim of the psychic to emerge as
the lord of our self may require an infusion of supramental
force in to our personalities. Supermind is a natural companion of the psychic
and as such may be expected to give a powerful helping hand for the psychic to
emerge from its subliminal cave. The Supermind is the objective version of
Sachchidananda and is described as the infinite truth consciousness wherein the
infinity corresponds to the Ananda and Truth corresponds to the Sat and the
Consciousness corresponds to the Chit. The Psychic has its origin in the
delight and dwells in our personality as the representative of the delight that
is above. Since Supermind and the
Psychic are from the same level it is only natural that they help one another
in their manifestation.
While doing her Purna Yoga Mother was highly intrigued by the question of
what the Supramental body would be like or how it would be constituted. Then
one day when a sadhak made pranams
to her She saw the psychic being of the sadhak acquire a solid form and come out of the sadhak’s body and stand in front of the Mother like any
other human being. Then it struck her powerfully that when the supramentalisation is complete it will help the Psychic to
gain a solidity that it did not have before and thereby emerge as the formed supramental being. This She has
described in her Agenda. From all
this we understand that the Psychic needs the mighty support of the Supermind
to gain the strength needed to emerge as the rightful Lord of our nature.
Gaining the support of the Supermind in our efforts to communicate with our
psychic may not be all that easy since for many devotees Supermind is a mere
word that is no more real to us devotees than the concepts of relativity
physics are to the common man. We may hope for far humbler supports in our
efforts to communicate with our Psychic. In Thoughts
and Aphorisms Sri Aurobindo has stated that so long as love and courage are
there we can hope to rescue the Psychic from its oblivion. This aphorism shows
that if we cultivate our love for the Divine and at the same time increase our
courage in our fight to help truth gain a victory over falsehood, we stand a
good chance of meeting our Psychic.
In Questions and Answers Mother has stated in very clear terms that
wherever there is a smile the divine is certainly there. This shows that if we
develop an attitude of constant joy and take an equal delight in all that
happens to us that may open a door for the Psychic to emerge. But so long as we
are in the prison of our ego such an attitude may not be possible. But such an
argument will never allow us to make any beginning in our efforts to manifest
the Psychic. If we take an effort to exhibit such an attitude and to sport a
smile all the time then we can start making a dent in the armor of our ego and
finally hope to shatter it by increasing such attitudes.
The emergence of the Psychic is
also enhanced by such qualities as gratitude and humility. The Psychic is always
paying adoration to the Divine. Therefore if we cultivate an attitude of
feeling constant gratitude towards the Divine Mother for all that SHE has done
to us we will be tuning ourselves to be on the same frequency as that of our
Psychic. Moreover an attitude of humility is a powerful aid here. For all the
magnificence of his creations the Divine has never developed a vain glorious
attitude about himself and is not constantly craving
for our praise and appreciation. How
many times we stand in front of the mirror and admire our own figure and praise
our own beauty to ourselves? This creation is the Divine’s mirror to his own
creative powers. If he wants he can admire his own creation and thereby admire
himself all day long. This is precisely
what he does not do. That is an act of immense humility. Our accomplishments
are nothing compared to His. Therefore if we forget our accomplishments and
stand before him with folded hands in total humility we will form a perfect
alignment with our own Psychic being that will help it to emerge on the surface
and envelope us with its joy and love and sweetness.
In one of Sri Aurobindo’s poems addressed to life we find the following
words:-
“Mystic Miracle,
daughter of delight
Youth’s blithe deity”
This poetic appreciation can be aptly applied to our Psychic
being also. We can add two more lines.
“Mystic Miracle,
daughter of delight
Youth’s blithe deity
Emerge from your
inner recess
and
make our life one long journey
Filled with all that
is good and beautiful
and
noble.”