The Synthesis of Yoga - Sri Aurobindo Ashram

874 The Yoga of Self-Perfection
and errors of its handling by the mental ignorance, but revealed,
it and each movement of it, in its truth and totality of power and
delight, and directs the great and now hardly limitable powers
and capacities of the life dynamis on all its ranges according to
the simple and yet complex, the sheer and spontaneous and yet
unfalteringly intricate will of the Divine in our life. It makes the
vital sense a perfect means of the knowledge of the life forces
around us, as the physical of the forms and sensations of the
physical universe, and a perfect channel too of the reactions
of the active life force through us working as an instrument of
self-manifestation.
*
* *
The phenomena of this vital consciousness and sense, this direct
sensation and perception of and response to the play of subtler
forces than the physical, are often included without distinction
under the head of psychical phenomena. In a certain sense it is
an awakening of the psyche, the inner soul now hidden, clogged
wholly or partially covered up by the superficial activity of the
physical mind and senses that brings to the surface the submerged
or subliminal inner vital consciousness and also an inner
or subliminal mental consciousness and sense capable of perceiving
and experiencing directly, not only the life forces and their
play and results and phenomena, but the mental and psychical
worlds and all they contain and the mental activities, vibrations,
phenomena, forms, images of this world also and of establishing
a direct communication between mind and mind without the aid
of the physical organs and the limitations they impose on our
consciousness. There are however two different kinds of action
of these inner ranges of the consciousness. The first is a more
outer and confused activity of the awakening subliminal mind
and life which is clogged with and subject to the grosser desires
and illusions of the mind and vital being and vitiated in spite of
its wider range of experience and powers and capacities by an
enormous mass of error and deformations of the will and knowledge,
full of false suggestions and images, false and distorted