Sri Aurobindo

Letters of Sri Aurobindo

CWSA 35

Fragment ID: 8370

A Passage from “Rebirth and Karma”

In “Rebirth and Karma”,¹ I find the following: “We have in fact an immutable Self, a real Person, lord of this ever-changing personality which, again, assumes ever-changing bodies, but the real Self knows itself always as above the mutation, watches and enjoys it, but is not involved in it. Through what does it enjoy the changes and feel them to be its own, even while knowing itself to be unaffected by them?... This more essential form is or seems to be in man the mental being or mental person which the Upanishads speak of as the mental leader of the life and body, manomayaḥ prāṇa-śarīra-netā.”² Would not the mental being be part of the human personality – the mental, nervous and physical composite?

The mental being spoken of by the Upanishad is not part of the mental nervous physical composite – it is the manomayaḥ puruṣaḥ prāṇa-śarīra-netā, the mental being leader of the life and body. It could not be so described if it were part of the composite. Nor can the composite or part of it be the Purusha,– for the composite is composed of Prakriti. It is described as manomaya by the Upanishad because the psychic being is behind the veil and man being the mental being in the life and body lives in his mind and not in his psychic, so to him the manomaya puruṣa is the leader of the life and body,– of the psychic behind supporting the whole he is not aware or dimly aware in his best moments. The psychic is represented in man by the Prime Minister, the manomaya, itself being a mild constitutional king; it is the manomaya to whom Prakriti refers for assent to her actions. But still the statement of the Upanishad gives only the apparent truth of the matter, valid for man and the human stage only – for in the animal it would be rather the prāṇamaya puruṣa that is the netā, leader of mind and body. It is one reason why I have not yet allowed the publication of “Rebirth and Karma” because this had to be corrected and the deeper truth put in its place. I had intended to do it later on, but had not time to finish the remaining articles.

24 December 1935

¹ The sixteen essays published since 1952 as The Problem of Rebirth originally appeared in the monthly review Arya between 1915 and 1921. The first twelve, which were published in 1915 and 1919, were sometimes referred to as “Rebirth and Karma”. This informal title was used later as the subtitle of Section I of The Problem of Rebirth. (In the United States, it also was used as the title of the entire book.) The Problem of Rebirth is reproduced in Essays in Philosophy and Yoga, volume 13 of The Complete Works of Sri Aurobindo, pp. 255–434. – Ed.

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² Sri Aurobindo, Essays in Philosophy and Yoga, p. 275.

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