Confusion About the Reality of the Atman and the Ego

We frequently allow our mental process and the limitations of language to create confusion within ourselves. The mind’s primary capacities involve fragmentation and classification; thus, we identify different aspects, parts, beings, roles, events and treat them as separate and distinct from one another. By doing this we remain fixated with the actions of the exte
al nature and fail to recognise the unity and oneness of the creation, and the One source and creator of all that exists to our vision as separate forms and actions. We thus become enmeshed in the consciousness of the ego, and lose touch with the source of the powers that act in the world, and in each individual. When we are able to step back and become the witness of the nature, we can see that the true essential being is formed and placed as a nexus of the creative process of the Divine through the agency of the Atman administering over the actions of each formation of being, with the ego being something of an illusory and temporary formation within the larger scope of development..

In the Shwetashwatara Upanishad [translated by Sri Aurobindo), Chapter six, verse 10, the seer writes: “Even as is the spider that out of himself fashioneth his own web, so is God One and nought else existeth, but by his own nature covereth Himself up in the threads He hath spun out of primal matter.”

Chapter four, verse 7 of the same Upanishad states: ” The Soul upon a common tree is absorbed and because he is not lord, grieves and is bewildered; but when he sees and cleaves to that other who is the Lord, he knows that all is His greatness and his sorrow passes away from him.”

Sri Aurobindo notes: “In a certain sense the various Purushas or beings in us, psychic, mental, vital, physical are projections of the Atman, but that gets its full truth only when we get into our inner being and know the inner truth of ourselves. On the surface, in the Ignorance, it is the mental, vital, physical Prakriti that acts and the Purusha is disfigured, as it were, in the action of the Prakriti. It is not our true mental being, our true vital being, our true physical being even that we are aware of; these remain behind, veiled and silent. It is the mental, vital, physical ego that we take for our being until we get knowledge.”

Sri Aurobindo and the Mother, Our Many Selves: Practical Yogic Psychology, Chapter 2, Planes and Parts of the Being, pp. 101-102