The Psychic Being and the Choice of a Suitable Birth to Carry Out Its Intention

We are generally so fixated on the outer process of procreation, pregnancy, and birth, that we fail to see the secret drivers of the entire process. The Greek philosopher Aristotle defined four types of causes, the material cause, the formal cause, the efficient cause and the final cause. The first one is the physical process of insemination, pregnancy with growth of the fetus, and the process of birth where the child comes out of the womb into the external world. The formal cause of this would be the genetic pattern that creates the specifics of the child and its formation and the mechanisms that bring about pregnancy and childbirth. The efficient cause is that force or power that brings the material and formal causes into existence and allows them to proceed. This would be the intention of the psychic being. The final cause is the purpose for which the psychic being determines to take birth in the world. Causation does not take place on the surface of life, but deep within and above where the consciousness behind the external forms acts and carries out its intentions.

One of the factors in the specfic birth into which a psychic being chooses to enter is the guiding purpose of that psychic being and its current intention in the overall process of its development, maturation and role. This purpose may actually find a suitable partner in the birth parents if they have a specific aspiration at the time of procreation and during the maturation process of the fetus in the womb. There can be a kinship that draws a specific psychic being to a specific birth to fulfill the intentions on both sides. Alternatively, there may be situations where the psychic being seeks out specific general conditions and takes birth in a general environment that works, despite the birth parents not expressly having the kind of intensive aspiration noted in the first case. We see examples of this where a young person, as he awakens to his spiritual aspirations, may take a totally different path and become somewhat estranged from his parents, or at least, separate and following a different program in his life than they may have desired.

There is then the interaction of the soul’s intention, the force of the psychic being, coming into contact with the more fixed and limited spheres of mind, life and physical body, which may create issues and hindrances to the complete and rapid fulfilment of the psychic being’s intentions, simply because it now has to act within the limitations of the external framework which can modify, dilute or distort its action to some degree.

A disciple asks: “Can it happen that the psychic being does not fall at the place where it wanted to take birth?”

The Mother observes: “If a psychic being sees from its psychic world a light on the earth, it may rush down there without knowing exactly where it is. Everything is possible. But if the psychic being is very conscious, sufficiently conscious, it will seek the light of aspiration in a precise place, because of the culture, the education it will find there. This happens much more frequently than one believes, especially in somewhat educated circles. An intelligent woman with some artistic or philosophical culture, a beginning of conscious individuality, may aspire that the child she is going to have may be the best possible according to her idea or according to what she has read. Hence it is not so very complicated to find a place. The number of psychic beings born constantly being considerable, if each time exceptional conditions have to be found it would be difficult. Surely, there are instances where the psychic being seems to have fallen headlong and been stunned, but this is bad luck; in such a case it generally requires a long time to wake up. It is bad luck in the sense that it probably lacked a certain power of discrimination, or perhaps it had to face certain forces which thwarted its decision and won a partial victory over it. There are a thousand possibilities, you know. One cannot say that everything goes according to the same plan — every psychic being is different.”

reference: Sri Aurobindo and the Mother, The Psychic Being — Soul: Its Nature, Mission and Evolution, Section 4 The Afterlife and Rebirth, pp. 139-140