Sri Aurobindo

Letters of Sri Aurobindo

5. Planes and Parts of the Being

Fragment ID: 386

The psychic being is described in the Upanishads as no bigger than the size of one’s thumb! That of course is a symbolic image. For usually when one sees anybody’s psychic being in a form, it is bigger than that. As for the inner being, one feels it big because the true mental or the true vital or even the true physical being is much wider in consciousness than the external consciousness which is limited by the body. If the external parts seem to occupy the whole consciousness, it is when one comes down into the physical and feels all the activities of Nature playing on it – even the mental and vital movements are then felt through the physical and as things of a separate plane. But when one lives in the inner being then one is aware of a consciousness which begins to spread into the universal and the external is only a surface movement thrown up by the universal forces.