How to Recognise the Awakened Soul

In the Bhagavad Gita, Arjuna asks how the ‘liberated soul’ can be recognised. How does he walk? How does he talk? What distinguishing characteristics can we find that identify such a person? Sri Krishna responds that there are not external signs, but only the inner standpoint of the individual that marks the difference between someone still bound to the ordinary life and the soul who is liberated and free.

We know that the physical senses are bound within a range of vibrations that they can consciously receive and respond to. Similarly, the human intellect is bound within its own range of vibratory patterns, such that it cannot recognise powers, forces or beings that vibrate at a level outside that range. This is a reason why the intellect cannot be the judge and arbiter of spiritual issues, events or experiences. It simply does not have the capacity to understand things beyond its realm.

There is a proverb that says “it takes one to know one”. With regard to spiritual matters, this is very true! An individual who can consciously receive and experience the vibrations of the spiritual realm will be able to recognise and interact with another individual similarly capable.

In order to reach this stage of development it is necessary to overcome the limitations of the mind-life-body complex which is bound and held together in a tight frame by the ego consciousness. The ego makes it difficult, if not virtually impossible, to move to what may be called the ‘divine standpoint’. As the ego attenuates, the individual is able to free himself from the limits of that ego personality and thus, open up and become receptive to the spiritual energies and vibratory patterns.

The Mother observes: “When one truly attains wisdom, the true wisdom, the wisdom Sri Aurobindo is speaking of here, there is no longer higher and lower; there is only a play of forces in which each thing has its place and its importance. And if there is a hierarchy it is a hierarchy of surrender to the Supreme. It is not a hierarchy of superiority with regard to what is below.”

“And with human understanding, human reason, human knowledge, one is unable to discern this hierarchy. Only the awakened soul can recognise another awakened soul, and then the sense of superiority disappears completely.”

“True wisdom comes only when the ego disappears, and the ego disappears only when you are ready to abandon yourself completely to the supreme Lord without any personal motive and without any expectation of profit — when you do it because you cannot do otherwise.”

Sri Aurobindo and the Mother, Our Many Selves: Practical Yogic Psychology, Chapter 2, Planes and Parts of the Being, pp. 45-46