The Dual Levels of Body, Life, Mind and Soul -- the External Formations and the Inner, Subliminal and Subtler Level That Links to the Universal and Causative Being

0:00 The framework of the physical body and the limitations of the interface between the body, the life force and the mental powers of the external being circumscribe our awareness and our ability to perceive the forces at work that shape our existence. We can experience under various circumstances, a wider, subtler, more free ranging consciousness that sheds the limitations of the external being. When we quiet the promptings of our mind and vital we can receive inspirations, intuitions, perceptions from another level of awareness. Many people, for instance, have reported the experience of exiting from their physical body and undertaking a form of vital travel whereby they could see and experience things that were outside the range of the physical existence. Similarly, many creative people report that ideas or insights come to them in moments when they are not focused on their external activities.

1:09 The experience is often described as a kind of flash or intuitive understanding. These are actually impressions from the universal consciousness active in the pure mental, pure vital, or pure physical realms that actually are causative to our external reality. Seen from the divine standpoint, the reality begins and takes shape on these larger universal levels of mind, life and body, and then it is translated into the smaller, denser forms within which we experience our outer life. Similarly, there are two forms of the soul, the external form which takes on the color of our vital personality, which Triorrobindo calls the desire soul, and the deeper inner true soul.

2:06 Triorrobindo observes quote. There is a double soul or psychic term in us, as every other cosmic principle in US is also double. For we have two minds. One, the surface mind of our expressed evolutionary ego, the superficial mentality created by us in our emergence out of matter. Another, a subliminal mind which is not Hanford by our actual mental life and its strict limitations, something large, powerful and luminous, the true mental being behind that superficial form of mental personality which we mistake for ourselves.

2:47 So also we have two lives, one outer involved in the physical body, bound by its past evolution and matter, which lives and was born and will die. The other a subliminal force of life which is not cabin between the narrow boundaries of our physical birth and death, but is our true vital being behind the form of living which we ignorantly take for our real existence. Even in the matter of our being there is this duality, for behind our body we have a subtler material existence which provides the substance not only of our physical but of our vital and mental sheaths, and is therefore our real substance, supporting this physical form which we erroneously imagined to be the whole body of our spirit.

3:42 So too we have a double psychic entity in us, the surface desire soul, which works in our vital cravings, our emotions, aesthetic faculty and mental seeking for power, knowledge and happiness. And a subliminal psychic entity, a pure power of light, Lovejoy, and refined essence of being, which is our true soul behind the outer form of psychic existence we so often dignify by the name. It is when some reflection of this larger and purer psychic entity comes to the surface that we say of a man he has a soul, and when it is absent in his outward psychic life that we say of him he has no soul. The external forms of our being are those of our small egoistic existence.

4:40 The subliminal are the formations of our larger true individuality, therefore are these that concealed part of our being in which our individuality is close to our universal universality, touches it is in constant relation and commerce with it. The subliminal mind in US is open to the universal knowledge of the Cosmic Mind, the subliminal life in us to the universal force of the Cosmic life, the subliminal physicality in us to the universal force formation of cosmic matter. The thick walls which divide from these things are surface mind, life, body, and which nature has to Pierce with. So much trouble, so imperfectly, and by so many skillful, clumsy physical devices are there in the subliminal only a rarefied medium at once of separation and communication. So too is the subliminal soul in U.S. Open to the universal delight which the cosmic soul takes in its own existence and in the existence of the myriad souls that represent it, and in the operations of mind, life and matter by which Nature lends herself to their play and development.

6:04 But from this cosmic delight the surface soul is shut off by egoistic walls of great thickness, which have indeed gates of penetration, but in their entry through them the touches of the divine cosmic delight become dwarfed, distorted, or have to come in masked as their own opposites. End Quote. Reference Sri Aurobindo and the Mother, The psychic being soul, its nature, Mission and evolution. Section 1. Meaning and Nature of the Psychic Being, pages 24 to 25.