Importance of Communicating With the Inner Self

CHENNAI: Physical science and psychology in its present method is only an extension of physical science — conducts  its  search into things from down upwards; it regards matter as the foundation and the bottom of things and having searched into that foundation, got as it thinks to the very bottom, it believes, or once believed, it has by that very fact understood their depths, their centre, their height and top. But this is a naive error. The truth of things is in their depths or at their centre and even at their top. The truth of consciousness also is to be found at its top and in its depth or at its centre; but when we enter into the depths of  consciousness or when we try to reach its centre, we go off into trance and likewise before we get to its top, we go off into trance.

Our searches into matter also are vitiated by the fact that in matter consciousness is in a trance and gives no apparent response to our probing. In living matter, not yet mental, still subconscious, it does give sometimes a reply, but not one that we can understand, and, as for mind in the animal, it is only consciousness half awakened out of original trance of inconscient matter: even in the human being it starts from an original nescience, its expressions, its data, all that we can ordinarily observe of it, are the movements of ignorance fumbling for knowledge. We cannot understand from these alone what consciousness really is nor discover its source or its supreme possibilities or its limits, if indeed it has any limits and is not like being itself infinite and illimitable. Only if we can get away from this imperfection and ignorance to some top of its possibilities or to its latent depths or some hidden centre, can we discover its true nature and through it the very self and reality of our being.

How do we know that there is a top to consciousness or an inner centre, since  these are not apparent on the face of things? By its supernormal, not its normal manifestations and phenomena,  for the top of things is always supernormal, it is only the bottom  and what is near to the bottom that are normal, at any rate to our ordinary consciousness in the material universe. Especially we can know by the supernormal becoming normal to us — by yoga.

I mean by yogic psychology and examination of the nature and movements of consciousness as they are reveled to us by the processes and  results of yoga.

This definition at once takes us out of the field of ordinary psychology and extends the range of our observation to  an immense mass of facts and experiments which exceed the common surface and limited range very much as the vastly extended range of observation of science exceeds that of the common man looking at natural external phenomena only with the help of his  unaided mind and senses. The field of yoga is practically unlimited and its processes and instrumentation have a plasticity and adaptability and power of  expansion to which it is difficult to see or set any limit.

It is true also that modern inquiry probing into psychological as opposed to physiological phenomena has discovered certain truths that are equally discovered by yogic process, the role of the subconscient, the subliminal, double or multiple personality; but its observations in these fields are of an extremely groping  and initial character and one does not see easily how it can arrive at the same largeness of results here as in physiology, physics, chemistry or  other departments of physical science.

It is only by yoga process that one can arrive at an instrumentation which will drive large wide roads into the psychological unknown and not only obscure and narrow tunnels. The field of psychology needs a direct inner psychological instrumentation by which we can arrive at sure data and sure result in ourselves verified by equally sure data and results in our observation of others  and of the hidden psychological world and its play of unseen forces. The physical is the outwardly seen and sensed and needs physical instruments for its exploration; the psychological is the physically unseen and unsensed, to be discovered only by an organisation of the inward senses and other now undeveloped and occult means. It is through consciousness, by an instrumentation  of consciousness only that the nature and laws and movements of consciousness can be discovered — and this is the method of yoga.

It is true that modern psychology has probed the internal law of living matter and consciousness and arrived at results which are remarkable but limited and fundamentally inconclusive. We  know from it that  the movements of consciousness are  affected and on a certain side determined by the functioning of the physical organs. But still the nature, origin and laws of consciousness remain unknown; all that has been proved is that the body provides for it an engine or instrumentation for its manifestation in living physical bodies and that certain lesions, alterations of deteriorations of the engine may lead to considerable  or serious results in the functioning of the embodied  consciousness. This was to be expected and can at once be conceded; but there is no proof that consciousness is a function of matter or that it was originated by the chemical or biological processes of the body or that it perishes with dissolution of life in the body. The cessation of its functioning in the body at death proves nothing, for that was to be expected whatever the  origin of consciousness or its fundamental  nature.

 Its disappearance may be  a departure, a disappearance from the body, but not a disappearance from existence.

— Excerpt from the book Essays Divine and Human by Sri Aurobindo

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