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Namah Yogic insights into human psychology

The second complexity arises due to the His mass is buried in the animal mire.
presence of a subjective space of which man A strange antinomy is his nature’s rule.
has become aware. He has a world apart from A riddle of opposites is made his field:
the physical one that he inhabits. It is a world Freedom he asks but needs to live in bonds,
of thoughts and feelings and imaginations He has need of darkness to perceive some light
and wishes and hopes and fears and fantasies, And need of grief to feel a little bliss;
a world of anxieties and dreams where gods He has need of death to find a greater life.
and demons clash, claiming his mind-space. All sides he sees and turns to every call;
He is almost at perpetual war within. His He has no certain light by which to walk;
true intent is hidden deep within and very His life is a blind-man’s-buff, a hide-and-seek;
often what he professes and claims as his He seeks himself and from himself he runs;
driving motive is far from true. He does not Meeting himself, he thinks it other than he.
quite understand his own present state, so to Always he builds, but finds no constant ground,
speak. This is the second source of confusion, Always he journeys, but nowhere arrives;
leading to conflict of choices and decisions, He would guide the world, himself he cannot
that, unlike the animal driven by instincts, guide;
have to be made in man by conscious choices. He would save his soul, his life he cannot save.
To add to the distresses, these choices have The light his soul had brought his mind has lost;
to be made by him in a state wherein he does All he has learned is soon again in doubt;
not know the effect and cannot be certain A sun to him seems the shadow of his thoughts,
about the future in any way. Then all is shadow again and nothing true:
Unknowing what he does or whither he tends
Finally, unlike the beast, man is burdened He fabricates signs of the Real in Ignorance.
with the future. There is something in him that He has hitched his mortal error to Truth’s star.
keeps pushing him towards a yet undisclosed Wisdom attracts him with her luminous masks,
future as if all his present (and his past) But never has he seen the face behind:
were forever straining towards the future, of A giant Ignorance surrounds his lore.
which he hardly knows and can ever know Assigned to meet the cosmic mystery
with certitude. Pushed by the past, trapped In the dumb figure of a material world,
uncomfortably in the present, pulled and His passport of entry false and his personage,
straining towards the future, man is yet He is compelled to be what he is not;
to discover himself and the true law of his He obeys the Inconscience he had come to rule
being. Sri Aurobindo reveals this strange And sinks in Matter to fulfil his soul.
predicament of man poignantly, thus: Awakened from her lower driven forms
The Earth-Mother gave her forces to his hands
“Assailed on earth and unassured of heaven, And painfully he guards the heavy trust;
Descended here unhappy and sublime, His mind is a lost torch-bearer on her roads.
A link between the demigod and the beast, Illumining breath to think and plasm to feel,
He knows not his own greatness nor his aim; He labours with his slow and sceptic brain
He has forgotten why he has come and whence. Helped by the reason’s vacillating fires,
His spirit and his members are at war; To make his thought and will a magic door
His heights break off too low to reach the skies, For knowledge to enter the darkness of the world

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