When we recognize the apparently insuperable obstacles placed by material nature to the natural outflowering of knowledge, bliss and oneness, we can fall into pessimism. Everything is so limiting, so difficult, so imposing in its apparent solidity that we tend to give up hope about the earthly life, and we seek our salvation or future in some other place or world or circumstance. It is no wonder that the ideas of a salvation in heaven, or a dissolution in nirvana, or an evolution into other planes and worlds have captured the imagination of humanity over the millenia–very few if any actually have had the audacity to consider that real and meaningful evolutionary change can actually take place to overcome the resistance of Matter and the fragmentation, division and darkness that is the hallmark of that resistance.
But this pessimism is overstated. If Mind were the ultimate creative principle and sole cause of the division of Matter, it would be an insuperable obstacle. But Mind itself is a secondary power and not the original cause. And thus, steps beyond the Mind are both possible and in fact necessary for the manifestation of the universal Being. Sri Aurobindo says it best when he states: “If, in other words, it is not merely a mental being who is hidden in the forms of the universe, but the infinte Being, Knowledge, Will which emerges out of Matter first as Life, then as Mind, with the rest of it still unrevealed, then the emergence of consciousness out of the apparently Inconscient must have another and completer term; the appearance of a supramental spiritual being who shall impose on his mental, vital, bodily workings a higher law than that of the dividing Mind is no longer impossible. On the contrary, it is the natural and inevitable conclusion of the nature of cosmic existence.”
reference: Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine, Chapter 25, The Knot of Matter
