Page 11 - All India Magazine Mar-2025

The False Soul and the True Soul

... there is in front in man a heart of vital emotion similar to
the animal’s, if more variously developed; its emotions are gov-
erned by egoistic passion, blind instinctive affections and all the
play of the life-impulses with their imperfections, perversions,
often sordid degradations, — a heart besieged and given over
to the lusts, desires, wraths, intense or fierce demands or little
greeds and mean pettinesses of an obscure and fallen life force
and debased by its slavery to any and every impulse. This mix-
ture of the emotive heart and the sensational hungering vital
creates in man a false soul of desire; it is this that is the crude
and dangerous element which the reason rightly distrusts and
feels a need to control, even though the actual control or rather
coercion it succeeds in establishing over our raw and insistent
vital nature remains always very uncertain and deceptive.
But the true soul of man is not there; it is in the true invisible
heart hidden in some luminous cave of the nature: there under
some infiltration of the divine Light is our soul, a silent inmost
being of which few are even aware; for if all have a soul, few
are conscious of their true soul or feel its direct impulse. There
dwells the little spark of the Divine which supports the obscure
mass of our nature and around it grows the psychic being, the
formed soul or the real Man within us. It is as this psychic being
in him grows and the movements of the heart reflect its divina-
tions and impulsions that man becomes more and more aware
of his soul, ceases to be a superior animal and, awakening to
glimpses of the godhead within him, admits more and more its
intimations of a deeper life and consciousness and an impulse
towards things divine.
CWSA 23: 150 Sri Aurobindo

All India Magazine, March 2025 11