The Psychic Being Carries the Essence of Experience Through Rebirth and the Evolution of Consciousness

0:00 We are born into the world, we grow, we learn, we participate in it, we age, and eventually we die. Many people look at this process without trying to understand any deeper significance. They involve themselves in the process and do not look at what happened before, what caused the existence we participate in, and what happens afterwards. They live within a plot line of events and relationships without any deeper significance and without identifying the parts of the story that are outside the stage we act upon.

0:41 This imagery is neatly laid out in Shakespeare's play As You Like It Quote. All the world's a stage and all the men and women merely players. They have their exits and their entrances, and one man in his time plays many parts, his axe being 7 ages. At first the infant muelling and puking in the nurse's arms, and then the whining schoolboy with his satchel and shining morning face creeping like snail, unwilling to school. And then the lover sighing like furnace with a woeful ballad made to his mistress eyebrow. Then a soldier full of strange oaths and bearded like the pard, jealous in honour, sudden and quick in quarrel, seeking the bubble reputation even in the cannon's mouth. And then the justice in fair round belly with good Cape unlined, with eyes severe and beard of formal cut, full of wise saws and modern instances.

1:57 And so he plays his part. The 6th age shifts into the lean and slippered pantaloon, with spectacles on nose and pouch on side. His youthful hose well saved a world too wide for his shrunk Shank, and his big manly voice turning again toward childish trouble. Pipes and whistles in his sound. Last seen of all that ends this strange eventful history is second childishness and mere oblivion. Sand's teeth, sand's eyes, sand's taste, sands, everything. End Quote.

2:44 When we look at the vast and highly detailed machinery of the Universal Creation, it becomes obvious that all of this structure, all of this complexity, all of this genetic coding, cellular structure, the electromagnetic spectrum, all of these interrelationships cannot be and are not simply random, meaningless events that occurred without a preceding cause and without a follow on effect. What we are missing in this very limited view is not the picture in front of us, but rather an understanding of how our lives fit into the patterns and developments in the universe. Sages and rishis, philosophers and scientists, seers and Mystics, visionaries and those guided by mental reason, all have through the ages explored the question of the significance of our lives, where we come from and why and where we are going to, and how.

3:53 Sri Aurobindo explored these issues at great depth and concluded that our world is the setting for an evolution of consciousness. That our current lifetime is just one in a series of lifetimes that allow us to carry not an individual personality forward, but rather the essence of the experience distilled in a soul entity, which he called the psychic being that utilizes the process as one of development and maturation to eventually express the Divine consciously through the body, life, mind complex that we inhabit during our lifetime. While he explored these questions at great length in rebirth and karma as well as in the Life Divine, he encapsulates this view in his visionary poetic expression. Sri Robindo writes in his epic poem Savitri, a legend and a symbol in Book 2, Canto 14 quote. A person persistent through the lapse of worlds, although the same forever in many shapes, by the outward mind unrecognizable, assuming names unknown, in unknown climes, Imprints through time upon the earth's worn page, a growing figure of its secret self, and learns by experience what the spirit knew till it can see its truth alive and God.

5:25 End Quote. Reference Srioro Bindu and the Mother, the psychic being soul, its nature, mission and evolution. Section 3. Growth and Development of the Psychic, page 72.