Sri Aurobindo

Letters of Sri Aurobindo

5. Planes and Parts of the Being

Fragment ID: 381

You take the outer waking consciousness as if it were the real person or being and conclude that if it is not this but something else that has the realisation or abides in the realisation, then no one has it – for there is no one here except the waking consciousness. That is the very error by which the ignorance lasts and cannot be got rid of. The very first step in getting out of the ignorance is to accept the fact that this outer consciousness is not one’s soul, not oneself, not the real person, but only a temporary formation on the surface for the purposes of the surface play. The soul, the person is within, not on the surface – the outer personality is the person only in the first sense of the Latin word persona which meant originally a mask.