Evolution out of the Inconscience of Matter

The material inconscience opposes our aspirations and our spiritual intuition of intention by being “the culmination of the principle of Ignorance.” Everything appears to be a brute, mechanical force without intention, without purpose, without significance, some kind of vast machinery with no living soul. If there is a Spirit, self-aware and conscious, it is not apparently obvious to be seen in the mechanisms of the material world. Some have hypothesized that a creator god created the world, but then left it behind, inert, dead, soul-less. Some say therefore that “God is dead.” Everywhere we turn we see this opposition that seems to mock at and deny the reality of the consciousness of Oneness, the Knowledge-Will that creates and manifests the universal Being out of sheer delight.

Even when we recognize that somehow out of this inert, soulless matter, there has evolved Life and eventually Mind, we do not see either how that has happened or what the significance of that fact can be. We only see that those who awaken into Mind in many instances treat it as a curse, as a form of suffering under the weight of inconscience and the brutal limitations imposed on that Mind by Matter and Life.

A deeper view may still see that this is the hidden Consciousness beginning to emerge from the depths of the Inconscience, but the road from these first weak inklings of awareness, the first steps on the road toward a spiritual fulfillment is long, hard, and filled with disappointment and opposition.

“We can see that it is the Consciousness which had lost itself returning again to itself, emerging out of its giant self-forgetfulness, slowly, painfully, as a Life that is would-be sentient, half-sentient, dimly sentient, wholly sentient and finally struggles to be more than sentient, to be again divinely self-conscious, free, infinte, immortal.”

The conditions of this evolution of sentience out of inconscience are those imposed by the denseness of Matter and eventually we must solve this riddle within the framework of Matter and Life.

reference: Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine, Chapter 25, The Knot of Matter