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forces" within which spirit seeks to establish a definite and steady relationship with a
particular human organism, produced according to the laws of nature operating in the
earth's biosphere.
In my book The Planetarization of Consciousness, I called such a field of forces the
"ideity field". 36 This field acts on the great variety of cells and organic functions in a human
being, functions which seek to hold the attention and draw to themselves the power of the
central self. In this field, spirit as Compassion and the drive toward unity seek to affect
this aggregation of desires inherent in the state of biological and psychic existence.
This state of existence is what the popular mind understands as life, but this is because
Western mentality has refused to see in life a universal power that is only for a period
focused upon and pervading a fecundated ovum (or vegetable seed). Sri Aurobindo
referred to that condition of biological existence and its multifarious desires as "the vital."
In some manner, integrative spirit and the too often discordant voices of the vital have to
meet and come to terms with one another. Mind, in its individualized aspect, builds the
ideity field to provide a meeting ground. But at first mind must deal with the basic
biological drives of the organism whose existence must be assured and perpetuated. This
biologically dominated mind becomes at the human level of existence the "lower mind,"
for which a better term is the concretizing mind. Another type of mind, however, operates
at an existence-transcending level. It usually is called the "higher mind," the builder of
archetypes. It gives a definite form to the dharma of the individual person.
The "body of individuality" I mentioned at the close of the preceding chapter is, in
principle, the manifestation of this archetype; but it is such a manifestation only when the
individual performs his or her dharma. In the early stages of the process of
individualization, the ego often usurps the power essentially belonging to the true self;
when this occurs the "body of individuality" (or mental body) is "fed" mainly by the
concretizing mind intent on sorting, generalizing, assimilating, and conceptualizing the
experiences of personal and sociocultural living. These experiences are conditioned by the
desire (kama) for a multitude of relationships with objects and other persons —
relationships which are mostly acquisitive and possessive.
In its archetypal aspect, the "body of individuality" is presumably what is known in
Hindu philosophy as karana sharira and among Theosophists as the causal body. The
term body, however, is confusing because it gives the impression of a well-organized
system of activities endowed with some consciousness of its own; in most human beings
today, the "body of individuality" is barely organized. Even the "body of desires" (or astral
body) usually is not a field of activities sufficiently well organized for a centralized
consciousness to operate objectively in it — as objectively as the ego can operate in a
physical body. An effective type of organization requires a strong, active, form-building,
and organizational mind.
36 See Part Two, Chapter 7, "Soul-Field, Mind, and Reincarnation
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