The Psychic Presence Manifesting in Animals

The psychic being is independent of the external nature and its development. The psychic being, with its direct contact with the Divine, remains in the background for much of the time, as it develops from lifetime to lifetime and gains increasing power over the actions of the external being.

The external being also grows and develops, from birth, through childhood, into puberty and then into adulthood and finally into elder years and eventual death of the body.

These two separate developmental processes interact to the extent that the external nature is able to become receptive to the influence of the psychic being. Otherwise, the influence is from behind. What this implies for the external development is that so long as the human being operates primarily on a physical and vital level, it reflects the core animal nature that acts on those levels. Thus, the analogy to the animal nature is correct insofar as the external nature goes, until the human being is able to evolve beyond, manifest and express the higher emotional, mental and psychic characteristics that differentiate the human being from the animal.

Animals themselves also have a psychic presence which we can experience when we interact with certain animals on a consistent basis. This is not a psychic being, but a psychic presence, the first spark, if you will, of what will eventually become the psychic being in a future incarnation. There are documented examples of animals acting to save other species, including human beings, from danger, or even, raising a baby of another species with the same care and consideration as if it were the same species. These are actions that reflect something more than pure animal consciousness, and provide a glimpse of the psychic presence that can manifest in animals under the right conditions.

A disciple asks: “If the inner truth, the divine presence in the psychic is so conscious in the child, it could no longer be said that a child is a little animal, could it?”

The Mother responds: “Why not? In animals there is sometimes a very intense psychic truth. Naturally, I believe that the psychic being is a little more formed, a little more conscious in a child than in an animal. But I have experimented with animals, just to know; well, I assure you that in human beings I have rarely come across some of the virtues which I have seen in animals, very simple, unpretentious virtues. As in cats, for example: I have studied cats a lot; if one knows them well they are marvellous creatures. I have known mother-cats which have sacrificed themselves entirely for their babies — people speak of maternal love with such admiration, as though it were purely a human privilege, but I have seen this love manifested by mother-cats to a degree far surpassing ordinary humanity. I have seen a mother-cat which would never touch her food until her babies had taken all they needed. I have seen another cat which stayed eight days beside her kittens, without satisfying any of her needs because she was afraid to leave them alone; and a cat which repeated more than fifty times the same movement to teach her young one how to jump from a wall on to a window, and I may add, with a care, an intelligence, a skill which many uneducated women do not have. And why is it thus? — because there was no mental intervention. It was altogether spontaneous instinct. But what is instinct? — it is the presence of the Divine in the genus of the species, and that, that is the psychic of animals; a collective, not an individual psychic.”

“I have seen in animals all the reactions, emotional, affective, sentimental, all the feelings of which men are so proud. The only difference is that animals cannot speak of them and write about them, so we consider them inferior beings because they cannot flood us with books on what they have felt.”

reference: Sri Aurobindo and the Mother, The Psychic Being — Soul: Its Nature, Mission and Evolution, Section 6 More Lights on the Psychic Being, pp. 172-173