What Is the Difference Between Spiritual and Psychic?

First, we must remember that Sri Aurobindo and the Mother relate the term ‘psychic’ to the soul, the aspect of the individual that maintains a direct connection with the Divine. The soul is an organising principle within the earth-consciousness and, while it maintains a connection to the Divine, nevertheless is rooted in the evolutionary principle of the earth-consciousness. The psychic being, which has developed and evolved over innumerable lifetimes, is based in the earth-evolutionary process and through aspiration is able to come into contact with the spiritual realms and spiritual powers and principles.

Spiritual describes planes of awareness that exceed the framework of the body-life-mind complex, and which ascend into realms of ever-increasing power and subtlety. It is in these higher planes of awareness that the Divine Presence is stationed. They act within their own sphere and project an influence that awakens and enlivens the psychic consciousness on earth, just as the sun’s radiation awakens and enlivens life in the material world.

A disciple asks: ”What is the difference between ‘spiritual’ and ‘psychic’?”

The Mother notes: ”It is not the same thing. The psychic is the being organised by the divine Presence and it belongs to the earth — I am not speaking of the universe, only of the earth; it is only upon earth that you will find the psychic being. The rest of the universe is formed in quite a different way.”

“The universe contains all the domains higher than the physical: there is a global physical comprising the mental, the vital, etc., and all the domains above the mental are domains of a spiritual order, domains which are, for us, domains of the spirit, and it is this ‘spirit’ which little by little, progressively, materialises itself to arrive at Matter as we conceive it. The beings of the Overmind, for instance, and all the beings of the higher regions have no psychic being — the ‘angels’ have no psychic being. It is only upon earth that the psychic life begins, and it is just the process by which the Divine has awakened material life to the necessity of rejoining its divine origin. Without the psychic, Matter would never have awakened from its inconscience, it would never have aspired for the life of its origin, the spiritual life. Therefore, the psychic being in the human being is the manifestation of spiritual aspiration; but there is a spiritual life independent of the psychic.”

Sri Aurobindo and the Mother, Our Many Selves: Practical Yogic Psychology, Chapter 6, Some Answers and Explanations, pp. 209-210