Mental Consciousness Cannot Directly Comprehend Spiritual Forces at Work

In order to know something, we need to utilize the tools and methods appropriate to whatever form or energetic action we are trying to know. Those things which rely on emotion, for instance, cannot be fully understood by the logical intellect. Similarly, the strict step by step process of mathematics is not something that the vital nature or the emotions in general can comprehend. This is actually one serious cause of misunderstanding between people, as they try to communicate with one another from vastly different perspectives and starting points.

How much more difficult it is, therefore, to understand an entirely different order of consciousness using powers and methods proper to a preceding order. The logical intellect, while it has its powerful capacities and benefits in its own field of action, is not competent to judge spiritual experience or the expression of spiritual force in action. This implies that the normal standards of determining what is valid or real, used by the mind, are unable to make a similar judgment.

The spiritual consciousness can only be understood by someone who is capable of experiencing that consciousness, who has the receptivity and intuitive understanding needed to comprehend its action. The mind may be able to infer the existence of a spiritual force through various effects that it cannot otherwise explain, particularly if these effects are reported by those who actually have experienced the spiritual consciousness directly, and thus, a correlation can be established.

The failure of the mind to comprehend spiritual experience with the tools of analysis, logic and reason leads many who are rooted in the consciousness of the external body-life-mind complex to simply deny the existence of the spiritual reality, or to treat it as some kind of result of the play of the material elements and powers that are the first basis of the material life. It is impossible to convince someone who has not had the actual experience and who demands ‘proof’ of the existence or action of the spiritual consciousness, just as it is equally impossible to convince someone who has never experienced concentrated thought that such a power of insight and action may actually exist. Many things that are the result of mental efforts look simply like miracles to those who do not have the current capacity for serious, organized, systematic thought and the results that come from that process. Similarly, those with the power of thought, but without spiritual insight or experience, may tend to deny or explain away spiritual forces at work. When the being is ready, the capacity for the next phase of development of consciousness opens up on its own, and at that time, without argument or denial, the understanding comes.

Sri Aurobindo observes: “Even in ordinary non-spiritual things the action of invisible or subjective forces is open to doubt and discussion in which there could be no material certitude, while the spiritual force is invisible in itself and also invisible in its action. So it is idle to try to prove that such and such a result was the effect of spiritual force. Each must form his own idea about that, for if it is accepted, it cannot be as a result of proof and argument, but only as a result of experience, of faith or of that insight into the deeper heart or the deeper intelligence which looks behind appearances and sees what is behind them. The spiritual consciousness does not claim in that way, it can state the truth about itself but not fight for a personal acceptance. A general and impersonal truth about spiritual force is another matter, but I doubt whether the time has come for it or whether it could be understood by mere reasoning intelligence.”

Sri Aurobindo and the Mother, The Hidden Forces of Life, Ch.7 Spiritual Forces of Help and Succour, pg.159