As We Become Aware of the Extent of the Challenges, We Come Nearer to the Solutions Required

In the preceding page, a passage from The Synthesis of Yoga by Sri Aurobindo was cited. The Mother is commenting on her impressions while reading that passage.

The challenges involved in changing the awareness and consciousness radically enough to recognise that the apparent primacy of the material life and circumstances is an illusion, represent a requirement for a major shift of standpoint. As with everything, once we understand the problem, and take steps towards adjusting our relation to that problem, we are already nearing the solution as the Mother points out. For most of humanity, this recognition has not come. There are a small number of people, one may call them forerunners, who even have an inkling of these issues, and they simply represent the first people truly touched by the pressure of the new, higher consciousness that is in the process of manifesting. As that consciousness works its way deeper and deeper into the material world, more people will awaken to the need, the opportunity and the path forward. This is the process of evolution at work, which, in the ordinary span of time, could take thousands of years. It is the hope that through conscious dedication and participation by those who awaken to this opportunity, the texturing of consciousness generally can lead to a more widespread recognition of and adoption of new ways of being, thinking and acting in the world. At present, it seems like the pressure of the existential crisis we face is forcing humanity to grapple with these issues in a much more focused manner.

The Mother observes: “It seems to me that when you begin to see things in this way, when they appear to you as they are described here, you are already close, very close to the solution.”

“The worst of it is that generally the whole material reality seems to be the only reality, and everything which is not that seems altogether secondary. And the ‘right’ of that material consciousness to rule, guide, organise life, to dominate all the rest, is justified to such an extent that if someone tries to challenge this sacrosanct authority, he is considered half-mad or extremely dangerous…. It seems to me one must still go a very long way to consider material life in the way Sri Aurobindo has described it here. And I am quite convinced that if one feels it like that, sees it like that, as he has described it, one is very, very close to the remedy.”

“It is only elite natures, those who have already had a contact with a higher reality, with something of the divine Consciousness, who feel earthly existence in that way. And when one can become so fully conscious of all these weaknesses and stupidities of the outer consciousness, all these falsehoods of the so-called material knowledge and so-called physical laws, the so-called necessities of the body, the ‘reality’ of one’s needs; if one begins to see how very false, stupid, illusory, obscure, foolish all this is, one is truly very close to the solution.”

“That is the impression I had while reading this…. I had the feeling that to see things in this way, one must have already climbed to a very high peak, and that one is at the gates of liberation….”

“If you can read this passage again and be convinced of its reality and its absolute truth, well, that is already a great step.”

Sri Aurobindo and the Mother, Looking from Within, Chapter 1, Looking at Life and Circumstances, pp. 19-20