The Power of the Spiritual Consciousness Is Needed to Overcome the Limitations of the Mental Approach to Existence

As the mental consciousness awakens, particularly if there is an influence coming from the psychic being or from the spiritual planes pressing down on the mental being, we become aware of virtually endless problems, issues, difficulties, imbalances, disharmonies and outright conflicts in the world and how we interact with each other and our environment. Those with a positive attitude and energy naturally want to “do” something to help straighten this out. They try many things. This is how humanity comes up with solutions based on technology, or economic system adjustments, scientific advancements that are supposed to solve some issue or other, political systems, religious doctrines, or sociological improvements, as well as enhancements in education, law-making etc. Eventually competing ideas are held by competing factions and a form of gridlock occurs and nothing can be done. When we become frustrated at slow progress, we try authoritarian rule. This has its own serious drawbacks with a reliance on one-sided, short-term solutions provided, generally more focused on keeping the authoritarians in power than on actually solving any of humanity’s issues. And thus, we struggle, suffer and face ever-increasing dislocations, disharmonies, obstacles and existential threats.

This process occurs due to the limitations of the mental power and its intermixture with the vital force based in desire, and the actual difficulties of managing physical nature. The natural forces that tend to bring about balance in the physical environment, and then, as the vital force evolves, in the interaction between the physical and vital, are disrupted with the evolution of mind, which by nature has a somewhat linear approach to things and does not see or take into account all the myriad aspects that go into making a comprehensive and complete understanding that can act to create a new balance and a new harmony. Each mental intervention is intended to bring a progress, and it generally does in one direction or another, but it also has a wide variety of ‘unintended consequences.’

Once the developed mental consciousness becomes aware of this dynamic, it begins to realize that the solution does not lie in mental planning or processes, but in the evolution and development of a next stage of consciousness in the evolutionary scale, a stage which can comprehend the entirety of the issues and forces at work, and which can know the harmonious balance that needs to be achieved and maintained. This is then the place where the spiritual consciousness, as manifested in what Sri Aurobindo and the Mother call the ‘supramental consciousness’, comes into play. The spiritual consciousness does not rely on mental argument but on the force of its consciousness, in and of itself, in creating an atmosphere and spiritual pressure that helps all beings respond in effective and harmonious ways.

The Mother observes: “And as soon as one is turned towards the spiritual life and reality, one touches the Infinite, the Eternal, and there can no longer be any question of a greater or smaller number of capacities or possibilities. It is the mental conception of spiritual life which may say that one has more or less capacity to live spiritually, but this is not at all an adequate statement. What may be said is that one is more or less ready for the decisive and total reversal. In reality, it is the mental capacity to withdraw from ordinary activities and to set out in search of the spiritual life which can be measured.”

“But so long as one is in the mental field, in this state, as it were, on this plane of consciousness, one can’t do much for others, either for life in general or for particular individuals, because one doesn’t have the certitude oneself, one doesn’t have the definitive experience, the consciousness has not been established in the spiritual world; and all that can be said is that they are mental activities which have their good and bad sides, but not much power and, in any case, not this power of spiritual contagion which is the only truly effective power.”

“The only thing that is truly effective is the possibility of transferring to others the state of consciousness in which one lives oneself. But this power cannot be invented. One cannot imitate it, cannot seem to have it; it only comes spontaneously when one is established in that state oneself, when one lives within it and not when one is trying to live within it — when one is there. And that is why all those who truly have a spiritual life cannot be deceived.”

“An imitation of spiritual life may delude people who still live in the mind, but those who have realised this reversal of consciousness in themselves, whose relation with the outer being is completely different, cannot be deceived and cannot make a mistake.”

Sri Aurobindo and the Mother, Powers Within, Chapter XXII Spirit, pp. 167-168