This bodily appearance is not all; The form deceives, the person is a mask; Hid deep in man celestial powers can dwell. His fragile ship conveys through the sea of years an incognito of the Imperishable.

A spirit that is a flame of God abides, A fiery portion of the wonderful, Artist of his own beauty and delight, Immortal in our mortal poverty. This sculptor of the forms of the Infinite, This screened unrecognized Inhabitant, Initiate of his own veiled mysteries, Hides in a small dumb seed his cosmic thought. In the mute strength of the occult Idea Determining predestined shaped and act, Passenger from life to life, from scale to scale, Changing his imaged self from form to form, He regards the icon growing by his gaze And in the worm foresees the coming god.

The compilation from Sri Aurobindo and the Mother published here in, “Soul and How to Find It” will help the readers, it is hoped, to turn towards the True Thing. The Mother has said, “Each one of you should be able to get into touch with your own psychic being, it is not an inaccessible thing. Your psychic being is there precisely to put you in contact with the divine forces.”

In the Upanishads there is a story. It was narrated by Nolini Kanta Gupta in one of his talks in these words: Once Narada I suppose it is Narada — went to a Rishi to get initiation. The Rishi asked him: “What have you learnt? What have you learnt in your life of a student now that you come to me?” Narada began to narrate all the Vidyas that he had learnt during his education as a Brahmachari, — all the Shastras, even Dhanurvidya, all kind of learnings. Then the Rishi said: “All that is Apara Vidya, the inferior knowledge. Do you know Brahman?” “No Sir, I do not know.” “That is the thing to be known. Once that one thing is known everything else is known.”

The Soul

(The sentences of the text are broken into phrases and printed below in separate lines in order to add emphasis to each phrase.)

The soul is something of the Divine that descends into the evolution as a divine Principle within it to support the evolution of the individual out of the Ignorance into the Light.

It develops in the course of the evolution a psychic individual or soul individuality which grows from life to life, using the evolving mind, vital and body as its instruments.

It is the soul that is immortal while the rest disintegrates; it passes from lf to life carrying its experience in essence and the continuity of the evolution of the individual.