Mukti is of different kinds but fundamentally it means freedom from Ignorance. It means that we know our soul, our true Self, the Divine within us and no more mistake ourself to be the body or the mind. One is identified with the psychic being and one thereby knows oneself to be a child, a portion, a part and parcel of the Divine Mother. This is the first fundamental mukti, the freedom of the individual soul from Ignorance and the false identification with the ego-self.
As a result of this identification our nature is reoriented towards the Light and the Right or the Law of Truth. This progressively liberates the mind from Ignorance, the vital nature from the law of desire and restlessness. There is a growing quietude, peace and stillness of nature and in that stillness one begins to perceive the Divine Self in all. This is the second Mukti which leads eventually to the experience of the cosmic consciousness, the cosmic Divine, the vast impersonal universal Reality or Brahman beyond.
There is yet another Mukti which is to go beyond cosmos, beyond Time and Space into the Transcendent Divine Reality that uses both cosmos as well as the creation to express Itself.
There are other associated realisations that come on the way, each of which is considered as mukti by its proponents.
Union with the Mother gives all of these as well as something which Mukti alone cannot provide, that is the transformation of nature into the divine nature and living in the constant nearness and the same status as the Divine. Sri Aurobindo describes this as the integral liberation that comes through the Mother as follows.
‘Therefore, also, an integral liberation. Not only the freedom born of unbroken contact and identification of the individual being in all its parts with the Divine, sāyujya-mukti, by which it can become free to even in its separation, even in the duality; not only the sālokya-mukti by which the whole conscious existence dwells in the same status of being as the Divine, in the state of Sachchidananda; but also the acquisition of the divine nature by the transformation of this lower being into the human image of the Divine, sādharmya-mukti, and the complete and final release of all, the liberation of the consciousness from the transitory mold of the ego and its unification with the One Being, universal both in the world and the individual and transcendentally one both in the world and beyond all universe.’
Affectionately,
Alok Da
