The Psychic Being and the Process of Rebirth Provide the Basis for a Real Purpose and Meaning in Life

0:00 Humanity has grappled with finding a meaning and purpose to life since time immemorial. We ask ourselves, why have we been born? Is there a meaning to life? What are we here to do? Is life simply about acquiring wealth, status, power and creating offspring? Is there anything else that acts as the true motive and purpose of living? As long as we remain bound within the confines of the body, life, mind complex, our external being and personality, we cannot understand that there is any higher purpose to life in the life Divine.

0:45 Sri Orovindo describes what he calls the materialist denial, which is the essence of a fixation on the external life to the exclusion of any deeper purpose. The significance of our lives is intimately tied up with the growth and development of the psychic being, the sole entity that participates in the manifestation and survives the process of birth, death and rebirth. Many people challenge the idea of rebirth. In his book Rebirth and Karma, Sri Aurobindo explores the various objections, alternatives, and substantial factual and experiential basis for the existence of rebirth and its role in the evolution of the psychic being across multiple incarnations. He further explores this subject in various chapters of The Life Divine.

1:45 Essentially, the meaning of our lives is bound up with the process of the soul's participation in the divine manifestation, the evolutionary process of development as the divine process unfolds, and the corresponding growth and development of the mature psychic being as the soul participates in the process across multiple lifetimes. Sri Aurobindo writes quote it is necessary to understand clearly the difference between the evolving soul psychic being and the pure Atman self or spirit. The pure self is unborn, does not pass through death or birth, is independent of birth or body, mind or life, or this manifested nature.

2:37 It is not bound by these things, not limited, not affected, even though it assumes and supports them. The soul, On the contrary, is something that comes down into birth and passes through death, although it does not itself die, for it is immortal from one state to another, from the earth plane to other planes and back again to the earth existence. It goes on with this progression from life to life through an evolution which leads it up to the human state and evolves through it all a being of itself, which we call the psychic being, that supports the evolution and develops a physical, a vital, a mental human consciousness as its instruments of world experience and of a disguised, imperfect but growing self-expression. All this it does from behind a veil, showing something of its divine self only in so far as the imperfection of the instrumental being will allow it. But a time comes when it is able to prepare to come out from behind the veil, to take command and turn all the instrumental nature towards a divine fulfillment. This is the beginning of the true spiritual life. The soul is able now to make itself ready for a higher evolution of manifested

4:08 consciousness than the mental human. It can pass from the mental to the spiritual and through degrees of the spiritual to the supermental state. Till then there is no reason why it should cease from birth. It cannot in fact do so. If, having reached the spiritual state, it wills to pass out of the terrestrial manifestation, it may indeed do so. But there is also a possible a higher manifestation in the knowledge and not in the ignorance. End Quote. Reference Srioro Bindu and the Mother, The psychic being, soul, its nature, Mission and evolution.

4:56 Section 1. Meaning and Nature of the Psychic Being, pages 12 to 13.