To Become Conscious of the Source of Our Thoughts, Feelings, and Actions

As we are primarily based in our ego-consciousness, we tend to accept that ideas we have, feelings we have, emotions we express, needs and desires we seek after, are all what make up ourselves, our personality, our persistent individuality. We identify with a specific religion, political movement, philosophy, or way of life and we think that we somehow are independent and created this for ourselves.

It is an interesting (and highly illuminating) practice to step back from all of these things, and try to trace back the sources from which these things arose. Does some of this come from human instinctive behaviour passed on through millennia? Does some kind from prenatal impressions? Is another portion of this based on the upbringing we have and relations with parents, siblings, relatives and friends? Does education, social media, passed on prejudice from others create the responses and reactions we have? Are there thoughts, feelings and pressures that are acting generally in the environment that are impinging upon us and pressuring a response? If we carry out this exercise with care, we can see that basically all of the surface actions and reactions are not actually our own, in terms of arising as a self-directed, self-sufficient development, but are basically things that come to us from somewhere else, and get cobbled together into what we then identify as our own set of beliefs, actions and reactions, likes and dislikes.

The Mother takes up the topic of what drives our normal human responses and actions and our basic ignorance of the sources. Once we become conscious of this dynamic, we can start to look at how to become a true individual, not just an amalgam of ideas, emotions, feelings, desires and reactions that have been built up within us from all of the various source directions.

A disciple asks: “Sweet Mother, why are we so attached to our ego?”

The Mother replies: “As I said just now, probably because you still need it very much, isn’t that so? In order to become a conscious, individualised being, one needs his ego; that is why it is there. It is only when one has realised his own individuality sufficiently, has become a conscious, independent being with its own reality, that he no longer needs the ego. And at that time one can make an effort to get rid of it. Unfortunately most people, as soon as they become real individuals, have such a sense of their importance and their ability that they no longer even think at all of getting rid of their ego. But that of course is something else.”

“Here I don’t let you go to sleep. I remind you from time to time of the true thing. But you are all very young, you see, and a certain number of years are needed, years of intensive inner formation, to become a being who thinks for himself, is conscious of his own will, and conscious of his own nature, his purpose of existence, independent of the human mass. A certain time is necessary. Some children begin when they are very small. If one begins very early, when one is twenty he can be quite formed. But you must begin when very small, and consciously, very consciously; you must begin with a sense of observation of all the movements in yourself, of their relation with others, of — precisely, of your degree of independence, real individuality, of knowing where impulses come from, where other movements come from: whether it is contagion from outside or something that arises from within yourself. A very profound study of all the movements in oneself is necessary in order to succeed simply in crystallising a being who is a little conscious, a little conscious. But when you live fluidly, so to say, when you don’t even know what goes on inside you, have some sort of vague impressions, if you question yourself, at least ninety-nine times out of a hundred, if you ask yourself, ‘Why did I think like that?’ ‘Why did I feel like that?’, even ‘Why did I do that?’, then the reply is almost always the same: ‘I don’t know. It came like that, that’s all.’ That is to say, one is not at all conscious.”

“Are you able to know, when you are with others, what comes from you and what from the others? To what extent their way of being, their particular vibrations act upon you? You are not aware of this at all. You live in a kind of ‘approximate’ consciousness, half-awake, half-asleep, in something very vague, where you have to grope like this in order to catch things. But do you have a precise, clear, exact notion of what goes on in you, why it goes on in you? And then, this: the vibrations which come to you from outside and those which come from within you? And then, again, what can come from others, changing all this, giving another orientation? You live in a kind of hazy fluidity, certain small things suddenly crystallise in your consciousness, you have just caught them for a moment; and it is just clear enough like that, as though there was a projector, just something passing on the screen and becoming clear for a second: the next minute everything has become vague, imprecise, but you are not aware of this because you have not even asked yourself the question, because you live in this way. It stops here, begins here, ends here. That’s all. You do from day to day, minute to minute, things which you do, like that…. it happens to be like that.”

Sri Aurobindo and the Mother, Our Many Selves: Practical Yogic Psychology, Chapter 3, Becoming an Individual, pp. 105-107