The Desire Soul, the True Soul and the Knowledge of the Heart

0:00 Sri Rubindo points out that man, the mental being, is actually a transitional being. The development of the mental powers represents quite a considerable leap from the pure vital powers and rudimentary mind found in the animal Kingdom. Nevertheless, even a cursory examination shows us that the mental being, even at its highest and most powerful level of development, cannot possibly be the final term in the evolutionary cycle, as we can recognize serious limitations and failures of the mental consciousness, which clearly cannot be solved by simply enhancing the mental development.

0:47 The issues lie primarily in several directions. 1st the mind remains very much influenced or even we may say controlled by the vital force of the being. In most human beings, the element of the vital and its influence on the mental power is which Rio Robindo describes as the desire soul and its action in the being. This energetic action represents what most people believe constitutes the soul that animates our lives and our responses. Second, the mental power itself tends towards very limited step by step logical development that seems to try to reduce everything to trenchant black and white dichotomies.

1:34 This limitation leads to inaccurate judgment, biases uninformed opinions, and essentially contributes to the power that the vital nature holds over the mind. Beyond the formation of the human being, the mental vital physical complex that we recognize and accept as being human, the next stage of the evolution of consciousness is in the process of unfolding. This process is A2 fold process of the pressure from the Universal Divine Force to manifest it and the opening within our nature of the aspiring and receptive element which can respond to this Divine pressure. This is the true soul deep within that by being one with the Divine is able to open to the intention of the Divine. Sri are open to observes.

2:31 Quote this ambiguity. These opposing appearances of depth and blindness are created by the double character of the human emotive being. For there is in front in men a heart of vital emotions similar to the animals, if more variously developed. Its emotions are governed by egoistic passion, blind instinctive affections, and all the play of the life. Impulses with their imperfections, perversions, often sordid degradations, heart besieged and given over to the lusts, desires, wraths, intense or fierce demands, or little greeds and mean pettiness, is of an obscure and fallen life force, and debased by its slavery to any and every impulse.

3:24 This mixture of the emotive heart and the sensational, hungering vital creates in man a false soul of desire. It is this that is the crude and dangerous element which the reason rightly distrusts and feels a need to control, even though the actual control, or rather coercion it succeeds in establishing over our raw and insistent vital nature, remains always very uncertain and deceptive. But the true soul of man is not there. It is in the true invisible heart, hidden in some luminous cave of the nature. There, under some infiltration of the Divine Light, is our soul, a silent inmost being of which few are even aware, for of all have a soul, few are conscious of their true soul or feel its direct impulse.

4:22 There dwells the little spark of the Divine which supports this obscure mass of our nature, and around it grows the psychic being, the formed soul, or the real man within us. It is as this psychic being in him grows, and the movement of the heart reflect its divinations and impulsions, that man becomes more and more aware of his soul ceases to be a superior animal. An awakening to glimpses of the Godhead within him admits more and more its intimations of a deeper life and consciousness and an impulse towards things divine. It is one of the decisive moments of the Integral Yoga, when this psychic being liberated, brought out from the veil to the front, can pour the full flood of its divinations, seeings and impulsions on the mind, life and body of man and begin to prepare the upbuilding of divinity in the earthly nature.

5:28 End Quote. Reference Sri Orobindo and the Mother, the psychic being soul, its nature, mission and evolution. Section 1. Meaning and Nature of the Psychic Being, pages 27 to 28.