The Potentiality of the Soul -- the Actuality of the Psychic Being

0:01 A seed in its essence contains all the potentiality that eventually turns into a full grown tree. It is useful to reflect on this when we look at the position of the soul in relation to the psychic being. The soul is like that seed to the extent that it has all the potential of the divine manifestation, but is not expressing it all at one time. Rather, the creation reveals and unrolls that potentiality into actuality through the operation of time. The psychic being is the instrumentality that turns the potentiality into the actuality.

0:43 There are some who hold that everything in the universe exists all the time. This is called the block universe concept and it essentially holds that it is our perspective that treats events in a linear step by step fashion as opposed to seeing them all simultaneously. Rishis with spiritual experience speak of the unity of the three times and the ability to see past, present, and future as one reality. The issue of free will or determinism gets bound up with these views as a block universe in which everything already exists implies determinism.

1:25 There are others who believe that there are an infinite number of universes representing the infinite possible sequences and facts of existence. These opposition's can be resolved by recognizing that from the divine standpoint there is a different vision that encompasses both the timeless and the manifestation through time. Well, from the purely human viewpoint, we see things taking place sequentially in a developing uniform direction, what we call the arrow of time. It is thus possible that both free will and determinism coexist and are both true within the framework from which they are being viewed.

2:11 The soul, which maintains the potentiality of the creation, and the psychic being, which develops the actuality of the soul's potential, are in this view 2 aspects of the same reality. The Tituria Upanishad sets forth a series of levels of consciousness. Our human viewpoint starts from the gross level of the material existence, the food sheath. There is a more subtle level, which is the vital sheath. Then comes the mental sheath. Beyond this comes the knowledge sheath. It is at this level, which Riora Bindu identifies with the term supra mental consciousness, that the intersection of the eternal and the temporal takes place and the unity is refracted into the multiplicity of forms in the creation.

3:07 Beyond this sheath comes the level of the pure existent. Satchit Ananda, Existence, Consciousness, Bliss, which is the ultimate source, continent, creator and maintainer of the entire creation, Sri Aurobindo writes Quote. The soul or psyche is immutable only in the sense that it contains all the possibilities of the divine within it, but it has to evolve them, and in its evolution it assumes the form of a developing psychic individual, evolving in the manifestation the individual prakruti and taking part in the evolution.

3:51 It is the spark of the divine fire that grows behind the mind, vital and physical, by means of the psychic being, until it is able to transform the prakruti of ignorance into the prakruti of knowledge. This evolving psychic being is not, therefore, at any time all that the soul or essential psychic existence bears within it. It temporalizes and individualizes what is eternal in potentiality, transcendent in essence, in this projection of the spirit. End Quote Reference Srioro Bindu and the Mother the psychic being soul, its nature, Mission and evolution. Section 1.

4:39 Meaning and Nature of the Psychic Being, pages 16 to 17.