Advanced Psychology — II

Matthijs Cornelissen
last revision: 03 November 2024

the self and the structure of the personality:
an overview of sri aurobindo's terminology1

If one's aim in yoga is liberation, one does not need a comprehensive understanding of human nature. One can focus one’s efforts on only those aspects of psychology that one really needs for the particular path one has chosen. For the integral transformation Sri Aurobindo envisaged and Infinity in a Drop aims at, one needs a deep, detailed, and integral understanding of human nature in all its astounding complexity. And complex human nature definitely is. In fact, the more one studies human nature, the more complex it turns out to be.

Sri Aurobindo writes:

The practice of Yoga brings us face to face with the extraordinary complexity of our own being, the stimulating but also embarrassing multiplicity of our personality, the rich endless confusion of Nature. (SY, p. 74)

After this, Sri Aurobindo proceeds with a rather remarkable depiction of the prevailing human condition. Especially the second sentence is worth reading slowly, chewing every phrase carefully:

To the ordinary man who lives upon his own waking surface, ignorant of the self’s depths and vastnesses behind the veil, his psychological existence is fairly simple. A small but clamorous company of desires, some imperative intellectual and aesthetic cravings, some tastes, a few ruling or prominent ideas amid a great current of unconnected or ill-connected and mostly trivial thoughts, a number of more or less imperative vital needs, alternations of physical health and disease, a scattered and inconsequent succession of joys and griefs, frequent minor disturbances and vicissitudes and rarer strong searchings and upheavals of mind or body, and through it all Nature, partly with the aid of his thought and will, partly without or in spite of it, arranging these things in some rough practical fashion, some tolerable disorderly order, — this is the material of his existence. (SY, pp. 74–75)

Sri Aurobindo’s portrayal is not particularly flattering, but it is one in which one can easily recognize oneself. Sri Aurobindo stresses subsequently that each part of one’s nature has its own character and that these different parts are not always in harmony with each other:

The most disconcerting discovery is to find that every part of us — intellect, will, sense-mind, nervous or desire self, the heart, the body — has each, as it were, its own complex individuality and natural formation independent of the rest; it neither agrees with itself nor with the others nor with the representative ego which is the shadow cast by some central and centralizing self on our superficial ignorance. We find that we are composed not of one but many personalities and each has its own demands and differing nature. Our being is a roughly constituted chaos into which we have to introduce the principle of a divine order. (SY, p. 75)

The complexity of human nature becomes perhaps most painfully clear when one tries to change it, and it is then that one needs a good map most desperately. Fortunately, there is a system to all the madness that happens inside a person, and over the years Sri Aurobindo developed a model of the personality that is relatively simple and eminently practical.

The model to be described here is one that Sri Aurobindo developed to guide the disciples who had gathered around him, with their sādhanā, or yogic practice. The basic structure and most of the terms are from the Ṛg Veda and the Upaniṣads. The terms can be grouped into three different sets:

• terms that belong to a concentric system: outer nature, inner nature, and true nature;
• terms that belong to a vertical system based on the Vedic Sevenfold Chord of Being: Matter, Life, Mind, Supermind, Ānanda, Cit-Tapas, and Sat;
• terms related to a person’s centre of identity: ego, soul, and Self.

These three sets are like perspectives that look at the same psycho-spiritual reality from three different directions. Each perspective has its own meaning and purpose and when they are brought together, one can see not only how all the different elements of human nature relate to each other but one can also discover the meaning and functionality of the structure as a whole. The reason for this is that the structure of the personality clearly indicates the direction into which we are heading, both individually and collectively. It shows itself in the presence of an evolving soul or psychic being at the very centre of our personality, and in the way the different sub-planes of the mind are stacked one above the other and how they differ from each other and from the vijñānamayakośa,2 completely above the mind. What stands behind all this is Sri Aurobindo’s vision of an on-going evolution of consciousness. It shows the inevitability of the movement as a whole and it makes it understandable where we came from, why we are struggling at present, and why it must be a stunningly beautiful future towards which we are heading.

All this can be understood most easily after some more basic issues have been covered. Thus, I will now first discuss the three sets of terms mentioned above, starting with the concentric system.

Endnotes