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