The Awakened Conscious Soul Chooses Its Next Birth and Its Conditions, Part 2

Paramahansa Yogananda, in his Autobiography of a Yogi, relates his awakening as a child to his spiritual destiny. He had a burning aspiration to go to the Himalayas to find his Guru and take up spiritual practices from a very young age.

The case of Yogananda, is exceptional, in that most spiritual seekers are not so aware of their spiritual mission and destiny as children; rather, they tend to become aware of this connection as they grow, mature and undergo a series of circumstances, events and chance interactions that point the way for them.

The Mother related similarly that at a very early age she was aware of a teacher coming to her in a dream or trance state. She later identified this teacher as Sri Aurobindo when she met him in person in Pondicherry. It was clear that she was destined to carry out the vision and development of the supramental consciousness which was the focus of Sri Aurobindo’s work and she took charge of the growing Ashram, developed the Sri Aurobindo International Center of Education and eventually founded the city of Auroville.

In his epic poem, Savitri: A Legend and a Symbol, Sri Aurobindo writes: “A thought was sown in the unsounded Void, A sense was born within the darkness’ depths, A memory quivered in the heart of Time As if a soul long dead were moved to live: But the oblivion that succeeds the fall, Had blotted the crowded tablets of the past, And all that was destroyed must be rebuilt And old experience laboured out once more.”

In the Taittiriya Upanishad, the planes of existence are described, starting with the densest, gross physical plane of Matter. Each succeeding level becomes more subtle and more powerful, yet when it enters the material world, it has its action modified by the action of the denser levels. This same dynamic takes place when the psychic being takes birth into the external world. Its action is limited, modified, even distorted, by the action of the mental, the vital and the physical nature with which it is set to interact. This causes not only dilutions of its ability to control what happens, but also the time required to accomplish its objectives.

The Mother continues: “It is necessary, it is this that makes the difference in months or days, perhaps not so much perhaps in years; however, this creates an uncertainty, and that is why it cannot foretell the exact date: ‘On that date, that day, at that hour I shall take birth.’ It needs to find someone receptive. When it sees that, it rushes down. But what happens is something like an image: it is not exactly that, but something very similar. It throws itself down into an unconsciousness, because the physical world, even human consciousness whatever it may be, is very unconscious in comparison with the psychic consciousness. So it rushes into an unconsciousness. It is as though it fell head foremost. That stuns it. And so generally, apart from some very very rare exceptions, for a long time it does not know. It does not know any longer where it is nor what it is doing nor why it is there, nothing at all. It finds a great difficulty in expressing itself, especially through a baby that has no brain, naturally; it is only the embryo of a brain which is hardly formed and it does not have the elements for manifesting itself. So it is very rare for a child to manifest immediately the exceptional being it contains…. That happens. Such things we have heard being narrated. It happens, but generally some time is needed. Only slowly it awakens from its stupor and becomes aware that it is there for some reason and by choice. And usually this coincides with the intensive mental education which shuts you completely from the psychic consciousness. So a mass of circumstances, happenings of all kinds, emotions, all sorts of things are necessary to open the inner doors so that one might begin to remember that after all one has come from another world and one has come for a precise reason.”

“Otherwise, if all went normally, it could very quickly have a connection, very quickly. If it had the luck to find someone possessing a little knowledge, and instead of falling into a world of ignorance, it feel upon a little bit of knowledge, everything would be done quite quickly.”

reference: Sri Aurobindo and the Mother, The Psychic Being — Soul: Its Nature, Mission and Evolution, Section 4 The Afterlife and Rebirth, pp. 141-144