Becoming Aware of the Soul and Its Action on Our External Being

0:00 We cannot see electricity, but we can see its action through the effects it brings about. Many things occur which we cannot identify with our senses directly, but which we can interpret based on results. In a similar way, while we cannot specifically identify the soul per SE, we can identify its impact in our lives as it gains a stronger presence within us. For the spiritual seeker, a retrospective back across the life and how we reacted at various stages of life can help us understand the pattern of the soul's emergence and action.

0:41 There may be modest indications, or there may be more significant reactions. In some cases, the seeker can see a change in the way he responds to other beings. Many seekers describe an earlier fear and destructive impulse relating to the presence of bees in their surrounding. Much of this is a surface trained response, although in some cases it is a result of traumatic experience of painful bee stings earlier in life. As they grow in their spiritual awareness, however, there is a frequent growth of appreciation and understanding for bees and other beings on the planet, and they gain both respect and a caring attitude towards them.

1:27 If the seeker looks back and compares the earlier reactions of the external surface being and the present response pattern, he can see that something has intervened to change his mind, his vital reactions, and even his physical comfort level. Other indications also occur. Shifting sensibilities regarding how other people are treated, what is important in one's life, and a focus on surrounding oneself with people and circumstances that build harmony, beauty, and goodwill in one's life are subtle signs of a new influence. Some people take up a vegetarian or vegan diet as their sensibilities adjust to a new reality. For others, the change can be more abrupt, less subtle. Some people report a serious traumatic event, perhaps even a near death experience, that triggers them to look at their lives and activities and priorities in an entirely new one.

2:35 One of the more extreme conversions was reported by Danny and Brinkley in his book Saved by the Light. He was struck by lightning, declared clinically dead, and then somehow return to life, but with an entirely new mission in life. He went from being a professional sniper to starting a new organization, Compassion in Action CIA to support Hospice patients. Many report a turn towards spirituality. They undergo extreme changes in their careers, focus and activities and take up yoga, meditation, mindfulness practices, devotional activities, or various forms of compassionate action such as feeding the hungry or healing the sick in a total change from their prior life priorities, Shrioravindo notes quote. As the evolution proceeds, nature begins slowly and tentatively to manifest our occult parts. She leads us to look more and more within ourselves, or sets out to initiate more clearly recognizable intimations and formations of them on the surface. The soul in us, the psychic principle, has already begun to take secret form.

3:57 It puts forward and develops a soul personality, a distinct psychic being, to represent it. This psychic being remains still behind the veil in our subliminal part, like the true mental, the true vital, or the true or subtle physical being within us. But like them, it acts on the surface life by the influences and intimations it throws up upon that surface. These form part of the surface aggregate, which is the conglomerate effect of the inner influences and upsurgings, the visible formation and superstructure which we ordinarily experience and think of as ourselves. On this ignorant surface we become dimly aware of something that can be called a soul, as distinct from mind, life, or body.

4:48 We find it not only as our mental idea or vague instinct of ourselves, but as a sensible influence in our life and character and action, a certain sensitive feeling for all that is true and good and beautiful, fine and pure and noble, A response to it, a demand for it, a pressure on mind and life to accept and formulate it. In our thought, feelings, conduct, character is the most usually recognized, the most general and characteristic, though not the sole sign of this influence of the psyche, of the man who has not this element in him or does not respond at all to this urge.

5:31 We say that he has no soul. For it is this influence that we can most easily recognize as a finer or even a diviner part in US, and the most powerful for the slow turning towards some aim at perfection in our nature. End Quote Reference Sri Aurobindo and the Mother, The psychic being soul, its nature, mission and evolution. Section 2. Role, function and Action of the Psychic. Pages 52 to 53.