The Awakening of the Soul to a Greater Life and Purpose

Until an aspiration awakens in the being, we tend to go about our lives taking cues from the promptings of family, friends, community, religion, or schools. Most people will not therefore recognise any greater or deeper purpose to their lives, and they simply determine to try to support themselves, enjoy themselves and carry out the tasks and relationships that are normal in their society. 

Once an aspiration awakens, however, the individual begins to slowly recognise a separation between those things which support the usual and habitual actions, and those that further the aspiration that has now made itself known to that individual. The awakening of an aspiration comes to a soul when it is prepared and matured enough to take on the new direction in the life, or when some stress of circumstances forces the soul to come forward. Some individuals, such as Danion Brinkley, see the entire direction of their lives upended after having a near death experience, or (as in his case) an actual death and resuscitation experience. The soul that is ready, however, may only need a hint, a word, a whispered sound, a nature experience of some sort to bring the soul forward and abandon the old life to take up the new direction.

A disciple asks: ”How can one become aware of the central will?”

The Mother writes: ”Ah, this of course is another side of the problem. First of all one must become aware of what is highest, most true, most universal and eternal in one’s consciousness.”

“This is learnt gradually. One learns to discern among one’s ordinary external movements and the different gradations of the movements of one’s inner consciousness. And if one continues to do this with a certain persistence, one realises what it is that puts this highest part of one’s being into motion, which represents the ideal of the being. There is no other way. Sometimes this awakens through reading something, sometimes through a conversation, sometimes through a more or less dramatic, that is, unexpected event, which gives you a shock, shakes you up, brings you out of your usual little rut. Sometimes when you are in very great danger, suddenly you feel as though you are above yourself and beyond your small habitual weakness, having within you something higher which can hold out against circumstances.”

“Such occasions make you enter, first, into contact with that.  Afterwards by a methodical discipline you can make the contact continuous; but usually this takes time. But first you get it like that, suddenly, for one reason or another.”  (Long Silence)

Sri Aurobindo and the Mother, Our Many Selves: Practical Yogic Psychology, Chapter 6, Some Answers and Explanations, pp. 169-170