Collated by Tusar Nath Mohapatra My life as ideology
The Shift of Standpoint from the External Being to the Psychic Being Brings a Release from Suffering
In A Tale of Two Cities, Charles Dickens sketches the character, personality and habits of an individual who utilized alcohol to avoid confronting the issues, the lack of direction and the loneliness of his life. Over time, he gains the goodwill and support of a family as he helps free a young wife’s husband from false espionage charges leveled by that husband’s enemies. He was able to do that through the confusion engendered by his extraordinary similarity of appearance to the husband. Over time, he recognised that his initial attraction for the young wife was converted into a sense of pure good will. When the husband, who was French, went back to his native land to aid some servants who had been caught up in the French Revolution, he was arrested, charged with crimes against the French revolutionary state, and scheduled for execution. At this point, Sidney Carton stepped in and changed places with the condemned man. While being transported for the execution, he befriended a young maid who was also condemned. As he ascended the platform of the guillotine, he declared that it was a far better thing that he was doing than anything in his life, and he was going to a far better rest. The incarceration, the suffering and death of the body and his external life took on a minor importance for him as he shifted his standpoint away from the external life to some inner realisation.
As long as we maintain our standpoint on the external personality, the body, the life-force and the mind, we suffer and try to find ways to reduce or avoid that suffering, as well as find happiness. We do not control the circumstances or the interactions that occur, and when they do not meet our desires, ambitions, goals or sensibilities we become upset.
If we shift our standpoint away from this external personality and its desires, we can experience what may be called ‘unconditioned happiness’, which is the native status of the psychic being, and we begin to respond from the standpoint of the psychic being, bringing with that change a new way of understanding our lives and our destiny.
The Mother writes: “It is not the psychic being that suffers for personal reasons, it is the mind, the vital and the ordinary consciousness of ignorant man. This is because the contact between the outer consciousness and the psychic consciousness is not well established. He in whom the contact has been well established is always happy.”
“The psychic being works with perseverance and ardour for the union to be made an accomplished fact, but it never complains and knows how to wait for the hour of realisation to come.”
reference: Sri Aurobindo and the Mother, The Psychic Being — Soul: Its Nature, Mission and Evolution, Section 6 More Lights on the Psychic Being, pp. 182-183
Related
Admit,—for it is true,—that this age of which materialism was the portentous offspring and in which it had figured first as petulant rebel and aggressive thinker, then as a grave and strenuous preceptor of mankind, has been by no means a period of mere error, calamity and degeneration, but rather a most powerful creative epoch of humanity. Examine impartially its results. Not only has it immensely widened and filled in the knowledge of the race and accustomed it to a great patience of research, scrupulosity, accuracy,—if it has done that only in one large sphere of inquiry, it has still prepared for the extension of the same curiosity, intellectual rectitude, power for knowledge to other and higher fields,—not only has it with an unexampled force and richness of invention brought and put into our hands, for much evil, but also for much good, discoveries, instruments, practical powers, conquests, conveniences which, however we may declare their insufficiency for our highest interests, yet few of us would care to relinquish, but it has also, paradoxical as that might at first seem, strengthened man's idealism.
On the whole, it has given him a kindlier hope and humanised his nature. Tolerance is greater, liberty has increased, charity is more a matter of course, peace, if not yet practicable, is growing at least imaginable. Latterly the thought of the eighteenth century which promulgated secularism has been much scouted and belittled, that of the nineteenth which developed it, riddled with adverse criticism and overpassed. Still they worshipped no mean godheads. Reason, science, progress, freedom, humanity were their ideals, and which of these idols, if idols they are, would we like or ought we, if we are wise, to cast down into the mire or leave as poor unworshipped relics on the wayside? If there are other and yet greater godheads or if the visible forms adored were only clay or stone images or the rites void of the inmost knowledge, yet has their cult been for us a preliminary initiation and the long material sacrifice has prepared us for a greater religion.
https://incarnateword.in/compilations/collected-social-writings-of-sri-aurobindo/materialism
From Isha Upanishad Commentary
II. Ethics in Primitive Society.
IV. The Place of Religion in Ethics.
Letters
Family, Society, Country and the Divine
https://incarnateword.in/compilations/toc/collected-social-writings-of-sri-aurobindo
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