Page 20 - All India Magazine Mar-2025

this is precisely what can, must and does happen,—it is the long-
delayed but inevitable next step in our evolutionary destiny. There
can be a decisive emergence in which the being separates itself
from thought and sees itself in an inner silence as the spirit in
mind, or separates itself from the life movements, desires, sensa-
tions, kinetic impulses and is aware of itself as the spirit support-
ing life, or separates itself from the body sense and knows itself
as a spirit ensouling Matter: this is the discovery of ourselves as
the Purusha, a mental being or a life-soul or a subtle self support-
ing the body. This is taken by many as a sufficient discovery of
the true self and in a certain sense they are right; for it is the self
or spirit that so represents itself in regard to the activities of Na-
ture, and this revelation of its presence is enough to disengage
the spiritual element: but self-discovery can go farther, it can even
put aside all relation to form or action of Nature. For it is seen that
these selves are representations of a divine Entity to which mind,
life and body are only forms and instruments: we are then the Soul
looking at Nature, knowing all her dynamisms in us, not by mental
perception and observation, but by an intrinsic consciousness and
its direct sense of things and its intimate exact vision, able there-
fore by its emergence to put a close control on our nature and
change it. When there is a complete silence in the being, either
a stillness of the whole being or a stillness behind unaffected by
surface movements, then we can become aware of a Self, a spiri-
tual substance of our being, an existence exceeding even the soul
individuality, spreading itself into universality, surpassing all de-
pendence on any natural form or action, extending itself upward
into a transcendence of which the limits are not visible. It is these
liberations of the spiritual part in us which are the decisive steps
of the spiritual evolution in Nature.
CWSA 22: 886-87 Sri Aurobindo

20 All India Magazine, March 2025