Soul, God & Ego

In Sachchidananda, there is only one Being, the Divine Being. But in the world we live in, when we think of “being”, we think of being in different ways. Each of us thinks of himself as an ego, a separate individual, and of all other people as beings separate from ourselves. We even experience God as something separate from us, a different being. If we withdraw from our ego, we can experience our soul, our true spiritual individuality, as a third being. Where do all these separate beings come from? How does this sense of three different types of being come into existence? We started with only the One, so they must all be expressions of the One.

Sri Aurobindo explains that the Supermind can manifest as these three poises – soul, God and ego. The soul represents the divine’s capacity to stand back from the creation. The ego represents its capacity to be fully involved in the creation. God represents its capacity to be lord of creation, both standing above it and directing it. As the Divine Soul (Jivatma), the real individuality behind the surface, it knows itself as one with all other expressions of itself. But when Being assumes the poise of the ego, it experiences itself as a separate person. In Apprehending Supermind, the Divine concentrates on these three different poises of itself and gives reality to all of them. It looks out through all of their eyes, while all the time never ceasing to be or to know that it encompasses and exceeds all three. It is only at the next lower step when Supermind gives rise to Mind that the distinct forms of the One lose the consciousness of their Oneness and begin to experience themselves as separate and different beings. The Ishwara manifests as many different Gods, each conscious that it is the One. The ego loses contact with the soul in its depth and feels itself cut off from the Divine above, from other egos and from the world around it. The soul looks at the ego as something different from itself. The Sankhyas experienced the truth of the Jivatma, but they saw multiple souls. They saw that each of us has a soul, and they stopped there. He says, if you go further you find that in Supermind there is only one soul, the Divine Soul. The experience of multiple souls by the Sankhyas is a true experience, but when you go back to what is behind these souls and their source, you always come to the same thing, the One. They are all one. But each gets isolated and forgets that all are expressions of the same one Divine experiencing itself from three different vantage points.