The Subtle Planes Are Causative to the External Physical Reality

In the Taittiriya Upanishad, a seeker undertakes a discipline to discover the truth of existence. He first lands upon the idea thta the material existence is the truth, as it is the basis and foundation of his existence. As he continues his concentration, however, he begins to realize that the external physical reality is actually caused by and developed through the action of ever-more-subtle powers of existence. Eventually he recognises that there is a causal plane, which is more subtle than the mind, the lifre-force or the body and which is itself caused by the ultimate even more subtle causative factor, Ananda, or bliss, which is part of the triple reality of Sat-Chit-Ananda, Existence-Consciousness-Bliss.

While we are fixated on the outer external physical world which we take for reality, there are more powerful planes of existence which create, and which provide the significance for this external reality.

Albert Einstein famously stated “Concerning matter, we have been all wrong. What we have called matter is energy, whose vibration has been so lowered as to be perceptible to the senses. Matter is spirit reduced to point of visibility. There is no matter.”

Modern-day scientists have begun to conclude that energy is not itself the ultimate, most subtle, or most causative factor. They now begin to recognise that consciousness is the causal force that creates energy.

The Mother observes: “It [the subliminal] is not necessarily more enlightened, more balanced — no. It is more subtle, it is less dull than our outer consciousness. Our external consciousness is so dull, it has no depth; as our outer understanding has no depth, our sensations have no depth; all this is something as though flat. So here it is fuller, but necessarily more true.

[A disciple asks:] “Then why is it the most important?”

The Mother responds: “Because it is internal. This is what supports the outer. The outer is only an appearance of this. As I said, in a dream when one goes there, one knows things which one doesn’t know, one can do things, one is in touch with things which one doesn’t know in the waking consciousness, because it is too superficial.”

It is like the inside of something. The outside is the expression of that, but an altogether surface expression. So naturally it looks the same; in any case more than a resemblance, it has an identity with what we see of it from outside. We see the form, don’t we, the expression; well, this expression has necessarily an analogy — more than an analogy — an identity with what is inside….”

“It is perhaps — perhaps — something like this, like the taste of a fruit. You know, you see a fruit, it has an appearance, it has a certain colour, it seems to you of a certain kind, but you cannot very well know what it tastes like until you taste it, that is, until you have entered inside it. It is something like this, something analogous to this.”

“Or maybe as in a watch — note that it is just to try to make myself understood, it is not really like that, it is only to try to make myself understood — when you see a watch, you see a dial and the hands moving, but if you want to know the watch you must open it and see the working inside.”

“It is something like that — you see only the effect, here; there is a cause behind. It is something like that. … The world as we see it and our outer consciousness are the result of something which is behind, which Sri Aurobindo calls the subliminal. And this itself, as he says, is set in motion by impulses which come from the subconscient below and the superconscient above, and so it is as though it were assembled there, and once it is organised there it is expressed in the outer consciousness, the ordinary consciousness.”

Sri Aurobindo and the Mother, Our Many Selves: Practical Yogic Psychology, Chapter 2, Planes and Parts of the Being, pp. 65-67