The Soul, the Psychic Being and the Evolution of Consciousness

Most people live their lives centered around the ego-personality and the exte
al life. Their focus and actions are based in the needs, desires and gratifications that are put up by the body, the vital life-energy and the mind. They do not have a conscious relationship with the soul or the most inward being, the psychic being, and thus, they do not fall under the explicit direction or control of the soul or psychic being. There remains the long, slow, growth stage of the psychic being from birth to birth, even if the individual is not consciously aware of it; this is however not as focused or as fast as a directed control exercised by the psychic being over the outer nature.

The Mother notes: “The soul, representative of the central being, is a spark of the Divine supporting all individual existence in Nature; the psychic being is a conscious form of that soul growing in the evolution — in the persistent process that develops first life in Matter, mind in life, until finally mind can develop into overmind and overmind into the supramental Truth. The soul supports the nature in its evolution through these grades, but is itself not any of these things.”

“The psychic being is organised around the divine spark. The divine spark is one, universal, the same everywhere and in everything, one and infinite, of the same kind in all. You cannot say that it is a being — it is the being, if you like, but not a being. Naturally, if you go back to the origin, you may say that there is only one soul, for the origin of all souls is the same, as the origin of the whole universe is the same, as the origin of the entire creation is the same. But the psychic being is an individual, personal being with its own experience, its own development, its own growth, its own organisation; only, this organisation is the product of the action of a central divine spark.”

“But the day an exte
al being (physical, mental, vital) enters into direct and constant contact with the psychic being, one may say in the same way that the physical being of this person is organised by the central divine consciousness.”

Sri Aurobindo and the Mother, Our Many Selves: Practical Yogic Psychology, Chapter 2, Planes and Parts of the Being, pp. 84-85