Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine, The Triple Transformation - Track 202

Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine, p.891

These are deeper experiences of the soul. Now if you permit me, I should read out to you a few paragraphs from the chapter that I have given you. If you open page 891 of The Life Divine, I shall read very slowly:

"At the beginning the soul in Nature, the psychic entity, whose unfolding is the first step towards a "spiritual change, is an entirely veiled part of us, although it is that by which we exist and persist as individual beings in Nature. The other parts of our natural composition are not only mutable but perishable; but the psychic entity in us persists and is fundamentally the same always: it contains all essential possibilities of our manifestation but is not constituted by them; it is not limited by what it manifests, not contained by the incomplete forms of the manifestation, not tarnished by the imperfections and impurities, the defects and depravations of the surface being. It is an ever-pure flame of the divinity in things and nothing that comes to it, nothing that enters into our experience can pollute its purity or extinguish the flame. This spiritual stuff is immaculate and luminous and, because it is perfectly luminous, it is immediately, intimately, directly aware of truth of being and truth of nature; it is deeply conscious of truth and good and beauty because truth and good and beauty are akin to its own native character, forms of something that is inherent in its own substance. It is aware also of all that contradicts these things, of all that deviates from its own native character, of falsehood and evil and the ugly and the unseemly; but it does not become these things nor is it touched or changed by these opposites of itself which so powerfully affect its outer instrumentation of mind, life and body.

For the soul, the permanent being in us, puts forth and uses mind, life and body as its instruments, undergoes the envelopment of their conditions, but it is other and greater than its members".

So this is the description of the basic character of the soul in us. Now the knowledge of this soul is you might say the first step in the process of triple transformation on which this whole chapter is written. It is entitled "The Triple Transformation".