The Psychic Being and Continuity of Consciousness

When we live primarily in our surface personality, we rely on memory to provide a form of continuity in our awareness. We may not remember all the details of the life we have lived to this point, but we tend to remember significant events, high points, things that stuck with us, whether joyful or sorrowful, traumatic or exhilarating. In some cases, various traumas are actually embedded in our cells and can be triggered by certain corresponding events that awaken that memory. And yet, the memory is, unless it is of a truly traumatic circumstance, generally a flat, in many cases a linear mentalized representation. We can recite “what happened” but it could just as easily be something we read in a book or saw in a film. The sense of continuity is more or less contained, at the surface level, in these encapsulated mental memories.

This is far different than the experience of the psychic being which looks back across the life with a view to the growth and development of the being. Instead of isolated transcriptions, the psychic being can view the key developmental processes that systematically led the outer being to a new, wider, deeper understanding and relationship to the life that is being led. The soul does not so much remember details of the outer experience, as moments when the soul has come forward and brought its awareness to the external being, perhaps during some revelatory experience, or during a deep trauma that breaks down the resistance of the mind, life-energy and body so that the deeper soul-force can come forward. In some cases, the psychic being can have a sense of how this very lifetime carried on a progression that began long before, without remembering the specific circumstances of the prior lifetime. There is more a sense of the flow of continuous motion of which the current lifetime is just a small segment of time and experience.

A disciple inquires: “Mother, here Sri Aurobindo speaks of ‘the psychic behind supporting all’. What does this mean?”

The Mother answers: “Well, yes, the psychic is behind the whole organisation, this triple organisation of human life and consciousness, the psychic is behind and supports it by its consciousness which is an immortal one. It is because of the psychic that we have so clear a sense of continuity. Otherwise if you compare what you now are with what you were when you were three, obviously you couldn’t recognise yourself in any way, either physically or vitally or mentally. There is no resemblance of any kind. But behind there is the psychic which supports the development, the growth of the being and gives this continuity of consciousness, makes one feel that he is the same being even while being absolutely different, absolutely different. If later one observes himself sufficiently, he can see that the things he understood and could do at that time are things which seem to him absolutely inconceivable now, and that he could never do a similar thing because he is no longer that person at all. And yet, because within there was the psychic consciousness which is immortal, one has the feeling that it is always the same being which was there and continues to be there and will continue to be there with more or less progressive and more or less conscious changes.”

reference: Sri Aurobindo and the Mother, The Psychic Being — Soul: Its Nature, Mission and Evolution, Section 6 More Lights on the Psychic Being, pp. 173-174