The One Way forward
“The spiritual aspiration is innate in man; for he is, unlike the animal, aware
of imperfection and limitation and feels that there is something to be attained
beyond what he now is: this urge towards self-exceeding is not likely ever to die
out totally in the race. The human mental status will be always there, but it will
be there not only as a degree in the scale of rebirth, but as an open step towards
the spiritual and supramental status.”
Sri Aurobindo: The Life Divine
It is obvious that what especially characterises man is this mental capacity of watching
himself live. The animal lives spontaneously, automatically, and if it watches itself live,
it must be to a very minute and insignificant degree, and that is why it is peaceful and
does not worry. Even if an animal is suffering because of an accident or an illness, this
suffering is reduced to a minimum by the fact that it does not observe it, does not project
it in its consciousness and into the future, does not imagine things about its illness or its
accident.
With man there has begun this perpetual worrying about what is going to happen, and
this worry is the principal, if not the sole cause of his torment. With this objectivising
consciousness there has begun anxiety, painful imaginations, worry, torment, anticipation
of future catastrophes, with the result that most men—and not the least conscious, the
most conscious—live in perpetual torment. Man is too conscious to be indifferent, he is
not conscious enough to know what will happen. Truly it could be said without fear of
making a mistake that of all earth’s creatures he is the most miserable. The human being
is used to being like that because it is an atavistic state which he has inherited from his
ancestors, but it is truly a miserable condition. And it is only with this spiritual capacity
of rising to a higher level and replacing the animal’s unconsciousness by a spiritual
super-consciousness that there comes into the being not only the capacity to see the goal
of existence and to foresee the culmination of the effort but also a clear-sighted trust in
a higher spiritual power to which one can surrender one’s whole being, entrust oneself,
give the responsibility for one’s life and future and so abandon all worries.
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
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