(a project of Mirravision Trust, Financed by Auroshakti Foundation)

A Psychological Approach to Sri Aurobindo's

The Life Divine

Life

There is a difference between mind as we ordinarily know it in the individual perspective and the universal mind-principle which is described by mystics and metaphysicians. At the individual level, mind is primarily concerned with perceiving existence which has already been created by a Force or Energy that operates in the matrix of matter. The human being of course ‘discovers’ and ‘creates’; but what is discovered is usually a hidden law that is already operative in nature (like the laws of gravitation); and what is created arises from a permutation and combination of incipiently existing forms, gross or subtle by the Force acting automatically in matter (The Life Divine, pg 187).

The mystic or metaphysician tries to understand the mind-principle as ‘a creative cosmic energy’ (Ibid) in the ethereal echelons of the cosmic consciousness that sub serves a cosmic Will to maintain the harmony in creation. Mystics also realized that the individual human ‘will’ is an imperfect projection of the universal Will.

Science has equally discovered a universal mind-principle, albeit ‘a subconscious Mind’ (Ibid), covertly operative in Matter, coeval with the material Force working in accordance to a subconscious operation of Will. Thus the electrons always rotate in their predestined orbits in a predetermined way in accordance to a covert Will that has to maintain a universe of harmony and concord. Any disruption of the electronic orbits can go haywire triggering a nuclear reaction.

Sri Aurobindo describes that the cosmic Will at the universal consciousness and the subconscious Will acting in material nature are in essence formulations of the same Force coeval with a Supreme Intelligence (Ibid, pg 188). Science would accept this phenomenon to demonstrate that a subconscious Mind or Intelligence creates the material world. Sri Aurobindo considers that this yet would be a partial and imperfect view of existence. This is because Mind is not an ‘independent and original entity’ (Ibid) but a final operation of the Supermind, the Supreme Creative Consciousness the ‘Real-Idea’(the Idea that manifests the Realty or the Real-essence of every Idea). It is difficult to appreciate this as Mind had to separate from Supermind to create a world of variability and diversity. Sri Aurobindo describes that even though the Mind-principle separates from the Supermind or ‘Truth-Consciousness’, the Supermind is latently active in Mind, hidden and veiled in Matter and implicitly incipient in Life-energy. This is the raison-de-atre that we can have laws of physical and biological sciences that maintain harmony and concordance. The behaviour of electrons as well as the stars follows physical laws or else we would not have been able to calculate the trajectories which spaceships traverse. The mango does not grow from the seed of the orange and the chromosomes maintain their unique identities in different species. Every character has a unique behavioural pattern (swabhava or ‘self-being’) and every behaviour is in consonance with its character-trait (swadharma or ‘self-law’) (Ibid, pg 189). ‘To use one of those wonderful formulas of the Upanishad which contain a world of knowledge in a few revealing words, it is the Self-existent who as seer and thinker becoming everywhere has arranged in Himself all things rightly from years eternal according to the truth of that which they are’(Ibid)

Sri Aurobindo is however cautious to point out that ‘this order and right relation can only be relative and not the supreme order and supreme right which would reign if Mind were not in its own consciousness separated from Supermind; it is an arrangement, an order of the results right and proper to the action of dividing Mind and its creations of separative oppositions, its dual contrary sides of the one Truth’(Ibid, pg 188).

Nevertheless, Sri Aurobindo also uses the movement in Nature that acts through swabhava and swadharma to chart a way to personal growth not through creeds or chartered paths but through a free growth in consciousness and through consciousness.