The Intermediate Zone and Its Dangers

We see many examples through time of individuals who began a spiritual quest with good intention and who later came to grief as they got caught up in the snares of what Sri Aurobindo calls the ‘intermediate zone’. When we leave behind the safety and security of the external consciousness and its grounded physical reality, and enter into a world filled with vital forces, pressures, inner thoughts and drives, it becomes difficult to sort out what is actually taking place. The seeker is allured by the exposure to new powers and forces, and may likely have various hidden desires and ambitions raised up and fulfilled. If he does not move beyond this stage, he can be devoured by forces far more powerful than he understands that have their own motivation and which feed on the emotions and experiences of the individual who comes under their control. The intermediate zone is a world of shifting forces, illusions, pressures and drives, vital enticements and hidden motives that can impact the unsuspecting seeker who believes he is making spiritual progress when in fact he is being guided, or controlled, by beings native to other realms.

There are cases of possession, such as the force that took over, and eventually destroyed, Adolf Hitler, which appear to be a power-hungry madness. There are also cases of individuals experiencing rapacious sexual appetites, or who have a drive to control the lives of others, such as we saw with Jim Jones and his Jonestown cult and mass suicide that he initiated among his devotees.

The protection as one passes through this zone can come in the form of purification techniques, such as the Yamas and Niyamas, set forth as preliminary practices in Raja yoga, or through transition to the soul-center, the psychic being, which is naturally connected to the Divine and not the ego-personality.

Sri Aurobindo writes: “I mean by [the intermediate zone] that when the sadhak gets beyond the barriers of his own embodied personal mind he enters into a wide range of experiences which are not the limited solid physical truth of things and not yet either the spiritual truth of things. It is a zone of formations, mental, vital, subtle physical, and whatever one forms or is formed by the forces of these worlds in us becomes for the sadhak for a time the truth — unless he is guided and listens to his guide. Afterwards if he gets through he discovers what it was and passes on into the subtle truth of things. It is a borderland where all the worlds meet, mental, vital, subtle physical, pseudo-spiritual — but there is no order or firm foothold — a passage between the physical and the true spiritual realms.”

“Anyone passing the border of ordinary consciousness can enter into this [intermediate] zone, if he does not take care to enter into the psychic. In itself there is no harm in passing through, provided one does not stop there. But ego, sex, ambition, etc., if they get exaggerated, can easily lead to a dangerous downfall.”

Sri Aurobindo and the Mother, Growing Within: The Psychology of Inner Development, Chapter VII Growth of Consciousness, Inner Experiences, pp. 136-137