The Lower and Higher Forms of Psychological Innocence and Purity

There is an ‘innocence’ of the instinctive vital nature. It acts according to its impulses, habits, instincts, without interference of any mental considerations, whether termed self-dealing, planning, calculation, conscience or ethical and moral constraints. The famous example is that the tiger kills its prey out of its instinctive need to satisfy its hunger and its nature as a predatory animal. It does not kill for ‘fun’ or for ‘recognition’ or for some sense of superiority, all of which are motives that arise within the context of human action. The child shares this innocence as it does not have the mental structure in place, it has not yet been trained, educated, acculturated, or indoctrinated in ways that would skew the natural response.

As the child grows, he is subjected to peer pressure, family pressure, school and social pressure and he begins to form a response to circumstances and events that take on a measure of calculated intention or some kind of vital rebellion if the mental development is not yet fully in place. In some cases, the structures set up by the mind and the societal training actually provide a needed framework for the individual to be protected from the impulsive vital reactions and their consequences. At some point however, the evolutionary path must lead beyond this mental framework and the social structure evolved from it.

Friederich Nietzsche propounded the idea that a superior man could disregard the moral and ethical strictures of society as he moved ‘beyond good and evil’. This does not imply, however, a return to the uncontrolled impulses of the unregenerated vital nature, which for a mentally developed individual is no longer a state of innocence; rather it implies that the individual has evolved beyond the reactions and therefore also the need to regulate them, which represent the desire-nature in an untrammeled action.

We see in the biblical book of Genesis the story of Adam and Eve living in a state of purity and innocence until such time as they eat the fruit of the tree that gives them the knowledge of good and evil; in other words, they lived in a state similar to that of the tiger who acts without calculation based on his nature, until such time as they developed the mental activity and began to analyze, review, compare and calculate, at which point they lost their state of innocence and had to contend with the pressures and reality of the forces at work in the wider world.

The return to Eden thus would be a higher status that no longer requires the mental framework to manage the unrestrained vital nature, but which automatically is aligned with the higher spiritual motive and purpose in the divine creation, and thereby acts with perfect purity with eyes open and all powers of the being in harmony with that purpose.

In his Thoughts and Aphorisms, Sri Aurobindo notes: ”I saw a child wallowing in the dirt and the same child cleaned by his mother and resplendent, but each time I trembled before his utter purity.”

A disciple asks: ”Can a child keep this purity even when he has grown up?”

The Mother responds: ”In theory, it is not impossible, and some people born away from cities, civilisations and cultures may maintain throughout the life of their earthly body this spontaneous purity, a purity of the soul that is not obscured by the mind’s working.”

“For the purity of which Sri Aurobindo speaks here is the purity of instinct, that obeys Nature’s impulses spontaneously, never calculating, never questioning, never asking whether it is good or bad, whether what one does is right or wrong, whether it is a virtue or a sin, whether the outcome will be favourable or unfavourable. All these notions come into play when the mental ego makes its appearance and begins to take a dominant position in the consciousness and to veil the spontaneity of the soul.”

“In modern ‘civilised’ life, parents and teachers, by their practical and rational ‘good advice’, lose no time in covering up this spontaneity which they call unconsciousness, and substituting for it a very small, very narrow, limited mental ego, withdrawn into itself, crammed with notions of misbehaviour and sin and punishment or of personal interest, calculation and profit; all of which has the inevitable result of increasing vital desires through repression, fear or self-justification.”

“And yet for the sake of completeness it should be added that because man is a mental being, he must necessarily in the course of his evolution leave behind this unconscious and spontaneous purity, which is very similar to the purity of the animal, and after passing through an unavoidable period of mental perversion and impurity, rise beyond the mind into the higher and luminous purity of the divine consciousness.”

Sri Aurobindo and the Mother, Our Many Selves: Practical Yogic Psychology, Chapter 6, Some Answers and Explanations, pp. 194-195