The Exploration of Inner Space

Humanity has developed a method for exploration of the world around us, and in recent times, the exploration has expanded to include exploration under the vast oceans, exploration of the solar system and further reaches of outer space. Attention has now turned to the internal foundations of life and new technologies allow us to map genomes and discover how the machinery of physical existence functions. All of this exploration however, relates to our surface lives, our physical body and its surroundings, and the vital and mental opportunities that arise through our life experience.

The ancient sages tell us to “know thyself” and counsel that as long as we are ignorant of what moves us in our lives, of what we are in our essence, and what the purpose and significance of our lives may be, we are missing the fundamental basis for our explorations. Sri Aurobindo in The Life Divine, devotes considerable attention to the ‘sevenfold ignorance’ within which we live and act.

Through techniques and practices such as the development of the witness consciousness and the separation of the witness from the nature, we can begin to actually see and understand what forces and factors create who we are in our external lives and how we will respond. We can begin to trace back the motive springs of our feelings, perceptions, thoughts, emotions, cravings, desires, habits and instincts. Once we take up this form of exploration, it becomes both exceedingly interesting and exceedingly valuable for our spiritual growth.

The Mother writes: “To perfect oneself, one must first become conscious of oneself. I am sure, for instance, that the following situation has arisen many times in your life: someone asks you suddenly, ‘Why have you done that?’ Well, the spontaneous reply is, ‘I don’t know.’ If someone asks you, ‘What are you thinking of?’ You reply, ‘I don’t know.’ ‘Why are you tired?’ — ‘I don’t know.’ ‘Why are you happy?’ — ‘I don’t know’, and so on. I can take indeed fifty people and ask them suddenly, without preparation. ‘Why have you done that?’ and if they are not inwardly ‘awake’, they will all answer, ‘I don’t know’ (of course I am not speaking here of those who have practiced a discipline of self-knowledge and of following up their movements to the extreme limits; these people can, naturally, collect themselves, concentrate and give the right answer, but only after a little while). You will see that it is like that if you look well at your whole day. You say something and you don’t know why you say it — it is only after the words are out of your mouth that you notice that this was not quite what you wanted to say. For instance, you go to see someone, you prepare beforehand the words you are going to speak, but once you are in front of the person in question, you say nothing or it is other words which come from your mouth. Are you able to say to what extent the atmosphere of the other person has influenced you and stopped you from saying what you had prepared? How many people can say that? They do not even observe that the person was in such or such a state and that it was because of this that they could not tell him what they had prepared. Of course, there are very obvious instances when you find people in such a bad mood that you can ask nothing of them. I am not speaking of these. I am speaking of the clear perception of reciprocal influences: what acts and reacts on your nature; it is this one does not have. For example, one becomes suddenly uneasy or happy, but how many people can say, ‘It is this’? And it is difficult to know, it is not at all easy. One must be quite ‘awake’; one must be constantly in a very attentive state of observation.”

Sri Aurobindo and the Mother, Our Many Selves: Practical Yogic Psychology, Chapter 4, Becoming Conscious, pp. 116-117