The Mental Purusha: the Witness Awareness of the Mind

As the seeker attempts to achieve the separation of the witness consciousness from the exte
al nature of the being (which is comprised of the body, the vital being and the mind), the first phase is generally the separation of the mental awareness from the body. This brings forth the awareness of the mental Purusha. This stage is intermediate to the complete experience of the separation of the Purusha from the Prakriti, as the individual still tends to identify with the mental being, but shows that the awareness is becoming sensitized to the different aspects and parts of the being and can begin to distinguish them. A certain amount of ‘distance’ arises between the mental awareness and the physical experience.

Sri Aurobindo notes: “Thus disciplined the mind will gradually learn to take up towards the body the true attitude of the Purusha. First of all, it will know the mental Purusha as the upholder of the body and not in any way the body itself; for it is quite other than the physical existence which it upholds by the mind through the agency of the vital force. This will come to be so much the normal attitude of the whole being to the physical frame that the latter will feel to us as if something exte
al and detachable like the dress we wear or an instrument we happen to be carrying in our hand. We may even come to feel that the body is in a certain sense non-existent except as a sort of partial expression of our vital force and our mentality. These experiences are signs that the mind is coming to a right poise regarding the body, that it is exchanging the false viewpoint of the mentally obsessed and captured by physical sensation for the viewpoint of the true truth of things.”

Sri Aurobindo and the Mother, Looking from Within, Chapter 5, Attitudes on the Path, pg. 163