Making Progress Unconsciously

Sri Aurobindo describes in The Synthesis of Yoga, the long, slow process of evolution that occurs in nature, long before human beings become conscious of this process. He indicates that through the conscious participation of the spiritual aspirant, this process can be made conscious and speeded up. Thus, yogic practice can condense into a much shorter time span, progressive development that would otherwise potentially require hundreds of years, if not millennia. Thus, there is a certain amount of progress that occurs within the natural evolution, unseen and unrecognised due to both its tardy pace and its infinitesimal increments of change. At a certain point, it is true, an evolutionary “saltus” takes place, whereby nature reaches a state of readiness such that a new principle can emerge, more or less like the “all or nothing” phenomenon of the firing of photons that bring vision to the eyes, or the 100th monkey phenomenon that can bring a new skill set to any species when sufficient members of that species have developed and implemented that skill set.

We then add to this review the question of the evolutionary development of the psychic being, the soul-entity that takes form across numerous lifetimes, carrying the essence of past experience forward as the basis for the progress of the individual soul to further evolutionary stages of development. This too occurs mostly unconsciously until the soul has become sufficiently evolved and awake to become aware of it. The body is dissolved with the ending of each lifetime, but the psychic being remains intact. Meanwhile, the vital and mental elements for the most part dissolve individually, but may contribute to the general enhancement of the vital and mental principles in the world-evolution. To the extent that the psychic being can actually hold together the vital or mental elements, it may also be possible to use them as a basis for development, in general terms, in subsequent incarnations, although this is obviously a much rarer phenomenon.

A disciple asks: ”Sweet Mother, do those who have this aspiration without knowing it also progress without knowing it?”

“Yes — yes.”

The disciple follows up: ”Then everybody is progressing, always, isn’t that so?”

The Mother writes: ”In a certain way, yes. Only it may not be apparent in one lifetime, because when there is no conscious participation of the being, the movement is relatively slow, even relative to the short duration of human life. And so it is quite possible, for example, that at the moment of death a being seems not to have progressed, and even sometimes it seems to have been going backwards, to have lost what it had at the beginning of its life. But if we take the great life-curve of its psychic being through many lives, there is always a progress. Each experience it had in one of its physical lifetimes helps it to make some progress. But it is the psychic being which always progresses.”

“The physical being, in the state in which it is at present — well, having reached a certain point of ascent, it comes down again. There are elements which may not come down again grossly; but still it does come down, one can’t deny it.”

“The vital being — not necessarily, nor the mental being. The vital being, if it knows how to get connected with the universal force, can very easily have no retrogression; it can continue to ascend. And the mental being, it’s absolutely certain, is completely free from all degeneration if it continues to develop normally. So these always make progress so long as they remain co-ordinated and under the influence of the psychic.”

Sri Aurobindo and the Mother, Our Many Selves: Practical Yogic Psychology, Chapter 6, Some Answers and Explanations, pp. 213-215