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Understanding Psychic and Soul In Their Deepest and Original Sense · Sri Aurobindo Studies

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  The English language leaves a lot of room for confusion simply
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  because terminology tends to be imprecise, inexact, or vague.
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  The issue is made even more difficult because, particularly
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  in the West, there is very little understanding of the vast
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  field of consciousness, the various planes and parts of the
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  being, and their interactions with one another.
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  It is compounded by the use of language to join together vastly
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  different things simply because they are not recognized in their
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  true place or significance. The term psychic has been used
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  to lump together all types of diverse phenomena.
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  Originally the root came out of the Greek and eventually Latin
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  term psyche, which translates in the original sense as soul or
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  spirit or animating force. Over time, the term took on
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  additional connotations, including mind and even ghost as
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  representing the spirit of a deceased individual.
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  The scriptural texts of the Bible reference the use of the
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  term as soul or spirit. The loosening of the meaning
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  seems to have started in the 1300s.
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  In the early 1900s it formally took on the additional meaning
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  in certain circles of mind. The study of psychology thus
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  became the study of the mind rather than the deeper sense of
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  the study of the soul. In the modern world we throw
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  around the word psychic to cover a cult phenomena, fortune
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  telling, and anything else which cannot be explained easily by
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  our very much blinded view about the powers that operate in our
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  lives. The understanding of soul has
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  also changed from its original sense of the spirit that
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  animates life, the spirit, to one that is conflated with our
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  desires in the external being. Thus, we speak of soulful
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  expressions, which generally represent the expression of deep
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  desires or emotions, rather than being necessarily related to the
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  deepest animating spirit behind the desires.
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  We have soul mates, we eat soul food, and we listen to soul
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  music. While there may have been a link
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  to the deepest spiritual seekings in the origination of
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  the use of these terms, they have acquired a much more
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  general sense in today's environment.
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  With this vast mass of confusion, it is easy for an
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  individual who takes up the practice of yoga to be somewhat
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  disoriented or misled. Srioro Bindo worked to codify
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  the use of the terminology and went back to the original root
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  meanings to help the spiritual seeker cut through all the
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  levels of confused understanding brought in by this wide range of
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  disparate phenomena lumped within the meaning of these
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  terms, Sriorobindu observes. Quote I mean by the psychic the
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  inmost soul being, and the soul nature.
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  This is not the sense in which the word is used in ordinary
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  parlance, or rather, if it is so used, it is with great vagueness
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  and much misprision of the true nature of this soul, and it is
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  given a wide extension of meaning which carries it far
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  beyond that province. All phenomena of an abnormal or
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  supernormal, psychological or an occult character are dub
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  psychic. If a man has a double
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  personality changing from one to another.
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  If an apparition of a dying man, something of his mere vital
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  sheath, or else a thought form of him, appears and talks
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  through the room of his wondering friend.
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  If a poltergeist kicks up an unseemly row in a house, all
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  that is classed under psychic phenomena and regarded as a fit
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  object for psychic research, though these things have nothing
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  whatever to do with the psychic. Again, much in yoga itself is
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  merely A cult, phenomena of the unseen, vital or mental or
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  subtle. Physical planes, visions,
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  symbols, all that mixed, often perturbed, often shadowy, often
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  illusory range of experiences which belong to this intervening
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  country between the soul and its superficial instruments, or
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  rather to its outermost fringes. All the chaos of the
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  intermediate zone is summed up as psychic and considered as an
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  inferior and dubious province of spiritual discovery.
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  Again, there is a constant confusion between the mentalized
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  desire soul, which is a creation of the vital urge in man, of his
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  life force seeking for its fulfilment, and the true soul,
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  which is a spark of the divine fire, a portion of the divine.
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  Because the soul, the psychic being, uses the mind and the
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  vital as well as the body as instruments for growth and
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  experience, it is itself looked at as if it were some amalgam or
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  some substratum of mind and life.
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  But in yoga, if we accept all those chaotic mass as soul stuff
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  or soul movement, we shall enter into a confusion without an
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  issue, all that belongs only to the coverings of the soul.
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  The soul itself is an inner divinity greater than mind or
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  life or body. It is something that, once it is
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  released from obscuration by its instruments, at once creates a
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  direct contact with the Divine and with the self and spirit.
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  End Quote Reference Sri Aurobindo and the Mother The
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  psychic being, soul, its nature, Mission and evolution Section 1
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  Meaning and Nature of the Psychic Being pages 3 to 4.