A Reversal of Consciousness Accompanies the Seeker’s Focus on Spiritual Growth

We read or hear about the accounts of individuals who had some kind of experience, either dramatically uplifting, or severely traumatic, who awaken to a spiritual purpose in their lives which changes the entire direction and focus of what takes place for them afterwards when compared with their earlier life.

The Tibetan yogi Milarepa experienced the tragic death of his father, followed by his uncle and aunt appropriating the family wealth and basically suppressing his mother, himself and his sister into poverty, and oppression. His anger led him to practice black magic and create a devastation in the village in retribution. Afterwards, as he began to reflect he suffered intensely about the harm he had caused through his giving way to his anger, and he made it his life’s mission to achieve salvation in one lifetime, leading to an intense spiritual sadhana. Milarepa experienced a ‘reversal of consciousness’ that changed his entire life focus, attitude and efforts.

A Roman soldier, Saul, on the road to Damascus to harass the budding Christian enclave there, had a dramatic spiritual experience of Jesus and had what we may see as a ‘reversal of consciousness’ from being an ardent and strict opponent to becoming a strong supporter of the Christian movement.

Dannion Brinkley was a mercenary, a hired killer. After being struck by lightning and being declared clinically dead, he returned to life, with a new outlook and understanding, recounted his experience in his book Saved by the Light, and gave up his former career to become a caring advocate for hospice support for those who were dying.

There are countless situations, some more mundane and some more extreme in their working, that have switched people from an outward focus based in the ego-consciousness and the workings of the body-life-mind complex to an inward and upward turn to take up the spiritual life and leave their former concerns and activities behind,; or else, adjust in such a way that those activities become part of their spiritual development.

Each individual who takes up the spiritual quest has their own version of the event or developments that converted them to that seeking. Until that occurs, the spiritual growth is more or less hidden behind the outer nature, although it must be noted, it is still working unseen to mature the individual to take up that effort.

A disciple asks: “Sweet Mother, how can someone who hasn’t much spiritual capacity best help in this work?”

The Mother writes: “I don’t know whether one can say that anyone has much or little spiritual capacity. It is not like that.”

“To live the spiritual life, a reversal of consciousness is needed. This cannot be compared in any way with the different faculties or possibilities one has in the mental field. It may be said of someone that he hasn’t much mental, vital or physical capacity, that his possibilities are very limited; in that case it may be asked how these capacities may be developed, that is, how new ones may be acquired, which is something rather difficult. But to live the spiritual life is to open to another world within oneself. It is to reverse one’s consciousness, as it were. The ordinary human consciousness, even in the most developed, even in men of great talent and great realisation, is a movement turned outwards — all the energies are directed outwards, the whole consciousness is spread outwards; and if anything is turned inwards, it is very little, very rare, very fragmentary, it happens only under the pressure of very special circumstances, violent shocks, the shocks life gives precisely with the intention of slightly reversing this movement of exteriorisation of the consciousness.”

“But all who have lived a spiritual life have had the same experience: all of a sudden something in their being has been reversed, so to speak, has been turned suddenly and sometimes completely inwards, and also at the same time upwards, from within upwards — but it is not an external ‘above’, it is within, deep, something other than the heights as they are physically conceived. Something has literally been turned over. There has been a decisive experience and the standpoint of life, the way of looking at life, the attitude one takes in relation to it, has suddenly changed, and in some cases quite definitively, irrevocably.”

Sri Aurobindo and the Mother, Powers Within, Chapter XXII Spirit, pp. 166-167