Our Surface Personality Is Only a Small Representation of Our Complete and True Being

0:01 We construct a personality that we present to the world and organize our expression and actions around this chosen construct. In doing so, we pick and choose elements that are present in our conscious mind, heart, life, force, and physical body, and create for ourselves the ego personality that seemingly ties all of this together into what we know as ourselves. In some cases, we consciously mislead ourselves and others by omitting thoughts, motives, drives, and reactions that are occurring through active suppression or through simple avoidance.

0:46 In other cases, we simply are not paying attention to all of the influences, forces, and powers that are moving us to act out of the impulsions that we are receiving. When we are placed under some kind of pressure, some of these deeper motivations and drives exhibit themselves, and we don't realize that these were there all the time, waiting for the opportunity to sprout up and manifest. Similarly, others may express shock and consternation about how these responses are so out of character. It is as if we have adopted a stage persona for our external life and the real person remains hidden deep within, Shriorobindo observes, Quote. We are not only what we know of ourselves, but an immense more which we do not know.

1:44 Our momentary personality is only a bubble on the ocean of our existence. What we know of ourselves, our present conscious existence, is only a representative formation, A superficial activity, a changing external result of a vast mass of concealed existence. Our visible life and the actions of that life are no more than a series of significant expressions, but that which it tries to express is not on the surface. Our existence is something much larger than this apparent frontal being which we suppose ourselves to be and which we offer to the world around us. This frontal and external being is a confused amalgam of mind formations, life movements, physical functionings, of which even an exhaustive analysis into its component parts and machinery fails to reveal the whole secret. It is only when we go behind, below, above, into the hidden stretches of our being that we can know it. The most thorough and acute surface scrutiny and manipulation cannot give us the true understanding or the completely effective control of our life, its purposes, its activities.

3:14 That inability, indeed, is the cause of the failure of reason, morality, and every other surface action to control and deliver and perfect the life of the human race. For below even our most obscure physical consciousness is a subconscious being, in which, as in a covering and supporting soil, are all manner of hidden seeds that sprout up unaccountably to us on our surface, and into which we are constantly throwing fresh seeds that prolong our past and will influence our future. A subconscious being, obscure, small in its motions, capriciously and almost fantastically sub, rational, but of immense potency for the earth, life again, behind our mind, our life, our conscious, physical. There is a large subliminal consciousness there, inner mental, inner vital, inner more subtle physical reaches, supported by an inmost psychic existence which is the connecting soul of all the rest.

4:27 And in these hidden reaches too lie a mass of numerous pre existent personalities which supply the material. The motive forces the impulsions of our developing surface existence. 4 In each one of us here there may be 1 central person, but also a multitude of subordinate personalities created by the past history of its manifestation, or by expressions of it on these inner planes which support its present play in this external material cosmos. And while on our surface, we are cut off from all around us, except through an exterior mind and sense contact which delivers but little of us to our world, or of our world to us.

5:20 In these inner reaches, the barrier between US and the rest of existence is thin and easily broken. There we can feel at once not merely infer from their results, but feel directly the action of the secret world forces, mind forces, life forces, subtle physical forces that constitute universal and individual existence. We shall even be able, if we will but train ourselves to it, to lay our hands on these world forces that throw themselves on us or around us, and more and more to control, or at least strongly modify their action on us and others.

6:04 Their formations, their very movements, yet again above our human mind, are still greater reaches super conscient to it, and from there secretly descend influences, powers, touches which are the original determinants of things here, and if they were called down in their fullness, could altogether alter the whole, make an economy of life in the material universe. End Quote Reference Sri Aurobindo and the Mother, The Hidden Forces of Life, Chapter 2, Hidden Forces within pages 33 to 35.