On the Nature of the Psychic
by N. Asokan
16 June, 2007
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. Reading about their experiences takes them anywhere from fifteen to twenty minutes. But a few people who have reentered their bodies after their encounter with their psychic have said that the clock was showing the same time as when they left their bodies. This shows the psychic lives in the timeless plane. Many of them have also said that after their encounter with their psychic they have acquired the capacity to know other peoples thoughts and feelings even when they do not say anything. They also acquire a profound respect for the sanctity of life and lead the rest of their life with the sense of a mission and responsibility.
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 Paris like any other normal European she was looking for the divine on the outside. One day another spiritual aspirant like her told her not to search for the divine outside but to look for him inside. This she said came as a remarkable revelation to her and from then on she undertook a one year non-stop effort to locate her psychic and succeeded in that. She was divine by birth and so it was possible for her to undertake that effort that possibly even continued through her sleep day after day. But it is doubtful how we who are mere mortal beings can undertake such sustained efforts that continue unbroken in spite of our sleep. There are people who have attempted twelve-hour meditation sessions described as “Calling the Mother” for one day, three days or even five days in a row. Many of them have described having remarkable spiritual experiences that could have possibly included an encounter with their psychic. Whether that encounter was limited to the calling sessions or the contact continues even after the session is not clear as such people are not forthcoming with the relevant information except confiding to their Guru.
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.”