Understanding Psychic and Soul In Their Deepest and Original Sense

The English language leaves a lot of room for confusion, simply because terminology tends to be imprecise, inexact, or vague. The issue is made even more difficult because, particularly in the West, there is very little understanding of the vast field of consciousness, the various planes and parts of the being, and their interactions with one another. It is compounded by the use of language to join together vastly different things simply because they are not recognised in their true place or significance.

The term ‘psychic’ has been used to lump together all types of diverse phenomena. Originally, the root came out of the Greek, and eventually Latin, term ‘psyche’, which translates in the original sense as soul, or spirit, or animating force. Over time, the term took on additional connotations including mind, and even ghost, as representing the spirit of a deceased individual. The scriptural texts of the Bible reference the use of the term as soul or spirit. The loosening of the meaning seems to have started in the 1300’s. In the early 1900’s it formally took on the additional meaning, in certain circles, of ‘mind’. The study of psychology, thus, became the study of the mind, rather than the deeper sense of the study of the soul!

In the modern world, we throw around the word psychic to cover occult phenomena, fortune-telling, and anything else which cannot be explained easily by our very much blindered view about the powers that operate in our lives.

The understanding of ‘soul’ has also changed from its original sense of the spirit that animates life, the spirit, to one that is conflated with our desires in the exte
al being. Thus, we speak of soulful expressions, which generally represent the expression of deep desires or emotions, rather than being necessily related to the deepest animating spirit behind the desires. We have soul-mates, we eat soul-food, and we listen to soul-music. While there may have been a link to the deepest spiritual seekings in the origination of the use of these terms, they have acquired a much more general sense in today’s environment.

With this vast mass of confusion, it is easy for an individual who takes up the practice of Yoga to be somewhat disoriented or misled. Sri Aurobindo worked to codify the use of the terminology, and went back to the original root meanings to help the spiritual seeker cut through all the levels of confused understanding brought in by this wide range of disparate phenomena lumped within the meaning of these terms.

Sri Aurobindo observes: “I mean by the psychic the inmost soul-being and the soul-nature. This is not the sense in which the word is used in ordinary parlance, or rather, if it is so used, it is with great vagueness and much-misprision of the true nature of this soul and it is given a wide extension of meaning which carries it far beyond that province. All phenomena of an abnormal or supe
ormal psychological or an occult character are dubbed psychic; if a man has a double personality changing from one to another, if an apparition of a dying man, something of his mere vital sheath or else a thought form of him, appears and talks through the room of his wondering friend, if a poltergeist kicks up an unseemly row in a house, all that is classed under psychic phenomena and regarded as a fit object for psychic research, though these things have nothing whatever to do with the psychic. Again much in Yoga itself that is merely occult, phenomena of the unseen vital or mental or subtle physical planes, vision, symbols, all that mixed, often perturbed, often shadowy, often illusory range of experiences which belong to this intervening country between the soul and its superficial instruments, or rather to its outermost fringes, all the chaos of the intermediate zone, is summed up as psychic and considered as an inferior and dubious province of spiritual discovery. Again there is a constant confusion between the mentalised desire-soul which is a creation of the vital urge in man, of his life-force seeking for its fulfillment and the true soul which is a spark of the Divine Fire, a portion of the Divine. Because the soul, the psychic being uses the mind and the vital as well as the body as instruments for growth and experience it is itself looked at as if it were some amalgam or some subtle substratum of mind and life. But in Yoga if we accept all thos chaotic mass as soul-stuff or soul-movement we shall enter into a confusion without an issue. All that belongs only to the coverings of the soul; the soul itself is an inner divinity greater than mind or life or body. It is something that once it is released from obscuration by its instruments at once creates a direct contact with the Divine and with the self and spirit.”

reference: Sri Aurobindo and the Mother, The Psychic Being — Soul: Its Nature, MIssion and Evolution, Section 1 Meaning and Nature of the Psychic Being, pp. 3-4