The Human Dilemma: the Underlying Cause of Anxiety

Being human is uncomfortable. We do not have the innocence of living that we find in the animal kingdom. We struggle with the pressure of growing knowledge about ourselves and our world, and an awareness of past, present and future that haunts us all the time. For many, this pressure is so unbearable that they choose to try to obliterate the awareness through various forms of dissipation, self-medication with alcohol or drugs, or through an attempt to regain the animal innocence by living in the present, care-free and oblivious, which, of course, is an illusion.

There is however a deeper significance to the dissatisfaction of humanity, and the anxiety that arises. Those that are satisfied generally remain fixed in their ‘status quo’. The force for development, progress and change occurs through the impetus of dissatisfaction with the current state of things. Thus, humanity is considered to be transitional and evolutionary in principle, and the dissatisfaction and anxiety that accompanies it represents the force that brings about evolutionary growth. It is said in the traditional scriptures that even the Gods, if they wish to make evolutionary progress, must take a human birth! The Gods are static beings at a higher vibrational level, to be sure, just as animals are static beings, at a lower vibrational level, than the human incarnation.

The Mother writes: “Of course, it is impossible for man to fall back to the level of the animal and lose the consciousness he has acquired; therefore, for him there is only one means, one way to get out of this condition he is in, which I call a miserable one, and to emerge into a higher state where worry is replaced by a trusting surrender and the certitude of a luminous culmination — this way is to change the consciousness.”

“Truly speaking there is no condition more miserable than being responsible for an existence to which one doesn’t have the key, that is, of which one doesn’t have the threads that can guide and solve the problems. The animal sets itself no problems: it just lives. Its instinct drives it, it relies on a collective consciousness which has an innate knowledge and is higher than itself, but it is automatic, spontaneous, it has no need to will something and make an effort to bring it about, it is quite naturally like that, and as it is not responsible for its life, it does not worry. With man is born the sense of having to depend on himself, and as he does not have the necessary knowledge the result is a perpetual torment. This torment can come to an end only with a total surrender to a higher consciousness than his own to which he can totally entrust himself, hand over his worries and leave the care of guiding his life and organising everything.”

“How can a problem be solved when one doesn’t have the necessary knowledge? And the unfortunate thing is that man believes that he has to resolve all the problems of his life, and he does not have the knowledge needed to do it. That is the source, the origin of all his troubles — that perpetual question, ‘What should I do? …’ which is followed by another one still more acute, ‘What is going to happen?’ and at the same time, more or less, the inability to answer.”

Sri Aurobindo and The Mother, Living Within: The Yoga Approach to Psychological Health and Growth, Disturbances of Mind, Anxiety, pp. 44-49