The reactions of the egoistic desire-soul make it seem that pleasure and pain, truth and falsehood, life and death are inescapably tied to one another and the only possible way out is to blank out all reactions in a type of supreme indifference. We see this position in a number of religious or philosophical approaches which stress liberation from the action of life through renunciation or non-attachment to the things of the world. The focus of these disciplines is to essentially liberate us from the reactions of the desire-soul and thereby make a more divine realisation possible.
Sri Aurobindo however points out that there is actually another solution, based not on indifference or renunciation, but based on establishing the foundation of the being in the true soul, which can then accept all responses from the world as having an equal value, an equal “rasa”. In this way, the standards used by the desire-soul to judge the touches of the world are replaced by the standards of the true soul which recognizes its oneness, its unity and its true knowledge-force and delight of existence. Pleasure and pain, birth and death, power and weakness are simply two poles of the same energy and have an equal value in the larger universal manifestation.
When this begins to occur we gain the status of impersonality able to accept and respond and judge the actions of the world from a disinterested standpoint impossible for the egoistic desire-soul to understand.
reference: Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine, Chapter 23, The Double Soul In Man
