The Soul: Triply Seeded

After writing a few posts on the 'Soul', it seems a logical next step to quote the Triad (Tribe) of yogis who to me represent the soul or triple seed of the Aquarian Age. Their conception, experience and description of the soul is in truth an invitation for the soul to come forward in the reader, so much so that its presence and organizing force begins to occur as a matter of fact. The triple seed and orbicular leaf of the blooming nasturtium seems a fitting visual introduction to the words of this Triad. [Note: The first quote is a repeat from The Soul and the Sunflower. I did not want to leave it out of this collection.]

Sri Aurobindo:

'It is the very nature of the soul or the psychic being to turn towards the Divine Truth as the sunflower to the sun; it accepts and clings to all that is divine or progressing towards divinity and draws back from all that is a perversion or a denial of it, from all that is false and undivine. Yet the soul is at first but a spark and then a little flame of godhead burning in the midst of a great darkness; for the most part it is veiled in its inner sanctum and to reveal itself it has to call on the mind, the life-force and the physical consciousness and persuade them, as best they can, to express it …. Unerring in the essence of its will, it is obliged often under the pressure of its instruments to submit to mistakes of action, wrong placement of feeling, wrong choice of person, errors in the exact form of its will, in the circumstances of its expression of the infallible inner ideal. Yet there is a divination within it which makes it a surer guide than the reason or even the highest desire, and through apparent errors and stumblings its voice can still lead better than the precise intellect and the considering mental judgment.'

‘…by the force of the secret Unity the soul in becoming is urged by its own unseen reality and by the occult pressure of evolutionary Nature to come out of this state of Ignorance and recover eventually the knowledge of the one Divine Being and its oneness with it and at the same time to recover its spiritual unity with all individual beings and the whole universe. It has to become aware not only of itself in the universe but of the universe in itself and of the Being of cosmos as its greater self; the individual has to universalize himself and in the same movement to become aware of his supracosmic transcendence. This triple aspect of the reality must be included in the total truth of the soul and of the cosmic manifestation, and this necessity must determine the ultimate trend of the process of evolutionary Nature.*

'When someone is destined for the Path, all circumstances through all the deviations of mind and life help in one way or another to lead him to it. It is his own psychic being within him and Divine Power above that use to that end the vicissitudes both of mind and outward circumstance.'

‘What is Meant by the Psychic Being: I mean by the psychic the inmost soul-being and the soul-nature.’

‘What is meant in the terminology of the yoga by the psychic is the soul element in the nature, the pure psyche or divine nucleus which stands behind mind, life and body (it is not the ego) but of which we are only dimly aware. It is a portion of the Divine and permanent from life to life, taking the experience of life through its outer instruments. As this experience grows it manifests a developing psychic personality which insisting always on the good, true and beautiful, finally becomes ready and strong enough to turn the nature towards the Divine. It can then come entirely forward, breaking through the mental, vital and physical screen, govern the instincts and transform the nature. Nature no longer imposes itself on the soul, but the soul, the Purusha, imposes its dictates on the nature.’ **

'It is the soul in us which turns always towards Truth, Good and Beauty, because it is by these things that it itself grows in stature; the rest, their opposites, are a necessary part of experience, but have to be outgrown in the spiritual increase of the being. The fundamental psychic entity in us has the delight of life and all experience as part of the progressive manifestation of the spirit, but the very principle of its delight of life is to gather out of all contacts and happenings their secret divine sense and essence, a divine use and purpose so that by experience our mind and life may grow out of the Inconscience towards a supreme consciousness, out of the divisions of the Ignorance towards an integralising consciousness and knowledge. It is there for that and it pursues from life to life its ever-increasing upward tendency and insistence; the growth of the soul is a growth out of darkness into light, out of falsehood into truth, out of suffering into its own supreme and universal Ananda.'

‘In the spiritual knowledge of self there are three steps of its self-achievement which are at the same time three parts of the one knowledge. The first is the discovery of the soul, not the outer soul of thought and emotion and desire, but the secret psychic entity, the divine element within us. … This is the first step of self-realisation, to enthrone the soul, the divine psychic individual in the place of the ego. The next step is to become aware of the eternal self in us unborn and one with the self of all beings. This self-realisation liberates and universalizes; even if our action still proceeds in the dynamics of the Ignorance, it no longer binds or misleads because our inner being is seated in the light of self-knowledge. The third step is to know the Divine being who is at once our supreme transcendent Self, the Cosmic Being, foundation of our universality, and the Divinity within of which our psychic being, the true evolving individual in our nature, is a portion, a spark, a flame growing into the eternal Fire from which it was lit and of which it is the witness ever living within us and the conscious instrument of its light and power and joy and beauty. '

The Mother:

Student: What is the role of the soul?
The Mother: But without the soul we wouldn’t exist! The soul is that which comes from the Divine without ever leaving Him, and returns to the Divine without ceasing to be manifest. The soul is the Divine made individual without ceasing to be divine. In the soul the individual and the Divine are eternally one; therefore, to find one’s soul is to find God; to identify with one’s soul is to unite with the Divine. Thus it may be said that the role of the soul is to make a true being of man.

Student: How does the soul influence a being who is normally unconscious?
The Mother: The soul’s influence is a kind of radiance that penetrates through the most opaque substances and acts even in the unconscious. But then its action is slow and takes a very long time to obtain a perceptible result.

'Some people say there is something outside their own will that organizes their whole life, that puts them in the required condition, that attracts favorable circumstances or people, that arranges everything outside them, so to say. In their outer consciousness, perhaps they wanted something and worked for it, but something else came. Well after some years, they realize that this is what really had to happen. You may know nothing of the existence of a psychic being within you and yet be guided by it. For, in order to become aware of something, you must first of all admit that this thing exists. Some people don’t. I have known people who had a genuine contact with their psychic being without knowing at all what it was, because there was nothing in them that corresponded to the knowledge of this contact.'

Patrizia Norelli-Bachelet (Thea)

‘… the soul is the spark of the Spirit in its plunge into the deepest depths of total being. Our manifestation is the soul of the Unmanifest, thus all material form is the encasement of the psychic substance and is the channel for the flowering and outpouring of its energy. Creation in matter is the crystalisation of soul.'

‘… [Man’s] soul is the manifested universe within him. He finds that it too is the perfect equilibrium; that it is the Infinite and the Eternal of his totality of being; that it is the centre of harmonisation, and that it pulls together the strings of all his various times and unites them around his great pulse. And that his individual pulse is then adjoined through his soul to the One Great Pulse that is the psychic being of the Unmanifest, the all-pervading reality and the totality of the universes.

‘Time is the field within which the marriage of Spirit and Soul takes place. Time and Timelessness are one and the same. When we speak of the Spirit, we speak of that which is Timeless; when we speak of the Soul, we speak of the Timeless in Time – that which is boundless yet bound, by powers inherent in itself.' . . .

'The freedom or formlessness of the Absolute would be its shackles if it had not the inherent possibility of self-manifestation within the limits of Form. The Formless and the Formed are one. Their simultaneous existence and their inherent oneness are what constitute absoluteness of being.

'In the individual these same potentialities and relationships exist. He is both free and bound, formless and formed: his soul is the bridge in between, the solver of the paradox. And soul is only conceivable or existent in matter; it is the spark of the Absolute Spirit in matter, the connecting bridge between the two poles of being: the supreme light of limitless spirit and the thick depths of dark matter. The soul essence is the hidden light in matter. It is its heart. The soul-essence is the core of Matter: the Kore. … The experience of the soul is the realisation of the Eternal Now. Added to this is the knowledge that all things can be known through this centre. All knowledge of the Manifest, as well as the Unmanifest, can come by a plunge into this limitless pool. The soul is a bottomless well of Light; to understand what is without and beyond we need only to plunge into the sweet, the blissful waters of this infinite yet infinitesimal pool. The soul is the point where the harmonisation of Time and Space occurs in the being of man – and also in the being of the Absolute. The soul is the harmony of Space and Time, thus it speaks to us of the Infinite as well as the Finite, the Eternal and the Temporal, the Point and the Circle. Through the soul the individual can know that the vast and the minute are one. And it is therein that we can solve the paradox of the simultaneous existence and oneness of the Unmanifest and the Manifest, – of the simultaneous being of the One and the Multiple, their perfect and utter harmony.

'Our universe is of this essence: a perfect utter harmony. Our Earth is of this essence: a perfect utter harmony. Our evolution as a collective becoming is to assist in the manifestation of perfect harmony. The collective body of mankind can realise its soul by realising the principle of Harmony that is its fundamental core and purpose of being.

'In this light the conscious development and understanding of a collective soul is indispensible in order for the evolution to be successful in its leap to a higher status. But all things resolve themselves in the individual, for the collectivity is but a multiplication of the one. As each individual realises his soul, the conscious formation of a collective soul becomes possible. And thereby the new way becomes manifest for Earth.'

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Notes: All quotes of the Sri Aurobindo and the Mother, with two exceptions, are from The Psychic Being – Soul: Its Nature, Mission and Evolution. The Sri Aurobindo quotes marked by a single asterisk came from The Life Divine, and the double asterisk from Letters on Yoga, Volume: 22-23-24 [SABCL]. The Patrizia Norelli-Bachelet excerpts are from The New Way, A Study in the Rise and Establishment of a Gnostic Society, Volume 1.

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