Overcoming the Static, Self-Satisfied Rigidity of the Mental Consciousness Is a Precondition to Development of a New Mode of Being

As long as we are blinded by the light of the mental consciousness, we fail to recognise the greater consciousness and power of the spiritual consciousness. We look upon human existence as static. The stories and myths held by large numbers of people in the world place the human being at the top tier of consciousness, and we applaud human achievements as the summit of what is possible. While we recognise the ability to increase the power of the mind, we fail to recognise that there are greater powers yet to be revealed that lie beyond the mind.

Today humanity is beginning to recognise the serious limitations and failures inherent in the mental consciousness. We have an analytical intelligence, which is most effective in classifying, codifying and fragmenting things into compartments. The creative ability to exceed the mental limits and synthesis new directions is rare and frequently misunderstood or even blamed for upsetting the established order of things. The mental consciousness through its limitations has led us to a point where the entire survival of the human race is in question, where everyone analyses the problems and their solutions differently and where we achieve, not progress in solving these issues, but a form of fixed intransigence or gridlock through adherence to competing ideas that each represent a partial view and partial solution. It is also self-satisfied in its rigidity and unwilling to recognise that human mental consciousness is not the apex of existence.

This view of things is static in what is in reality a dynamic reality. If we observe the development of consciousness through the lens of time, we see that life evolved out of matter, and that mind has evolved out of life. We also can recognise that there are individuals who have embodied new forms of understanding and awareness as the mental consciousness has matured, developed and reached its apex, and we can even recognise that more and more people are experiencing the development of a new form of awareness, which we may call the spiritual consciousness. This consciousness focuses on the unity of all existence, the pervasive nature of consciousness and works to show us how the fragmented view we accept in the mental realm is really just a partial, and highly specialised application of consciousness, not the supreme awareness that lies beyond the mind.

Interestingly, the Rishis of the Rig Veda had an understanding of the various planes of consciousness that lie both below and above the mental development. In The Life Divine, Sri Aurobindo provides a translation of verses from Mandala X, Sukta 129: “In the beginning Darkness was hidden by darkness, all this was an ocean of inconscience. When universal being was concealed by fragmentation, then by the greatness of its energy That One was born. That moved at first as desire within, which was the primal seed of mind. The seers of Truth discovered the building of being in non-being by will in the heart and by the thought; their ray was extended horizontally; but what was there below, what was there above? There were Casters of the seed, there were Greatnesses; there was self-law below, there was Will above.”

The Rishis here describe the development of the mental consciousness as a stage in the development which extends its view horizontally. They also point out that there are stages both below and above the mental level. Instinct, or self-law lies in a level below, while Will, the power of conscious intention manifested into form, lies above.

The Mother writes: “As long as the mind is convinced that it is the summit of human consciousness, that there is nothing beyond and above it, it takes its own functioning to be a perfect one and is fully satisfied with the progress it can make within the limits of this functioning, and with an increase of clarity, precision, complexity, suppleness, plasticity in its movements. … It always has a spontaneous tendency to feel very satisfied with itself and with what it can do, and if there were no greater force than its own, a higher power which irrefutably shows it its own limitations, its poverty, it would never make any effort to find its way out of all that by the right door: liberation into a higher and truer mode of being.”

Sri Aurobindo and the Mother, Growing Within: The Psychology of Inner Development, Chapter II Awakening of Consciousness, pp. 28-29