Even the highest, most refined and spiritualised levels of the mind are unable to fully comprehend and then integrate the divine consciousness that both exists as the aspects of the Transcendent, the Universal and the Individual, and unifies and harmonizes them into one embracing awareness. The mind is still a power of division and fragmentation and lives within its set limits. The integral spiritual realisation requires, therefore that the levels of mind are exceeded, and a new status of consciousness achieved which, as opposed to mind, has the power of unifying, integrating and expanding to hold that larger awareness.
Sri Aurobindo describes the transitional process: “Out of the individual we wake into a vaster freer cosmic consciousness; but out of the universal too with its complex of forms and powers we must emerge by a still greater self-exceeding into a consciousness without limits that is founded on the Absolute.”
This process is not one of abandonment of the lower levels of consciousness, however. “And yet in this ascension we do not really abolish but take up and transfigure what we seem to leave; for there is a height where the three live eternally in each other, on that height they are blissfully joined in a nodus of their harmonised oneness. But that summit is above the highest and largest spiritualised mentality, even if some reflection of it can be experienced there; mind, to attain to it, to live there, must exceed itself and be transformed into a supramental gnostic light, power and substance. In this lower diminished consciousness a harmony can indeed be attempted, but it must always remain imperfect; a co-ordination is possible, not a simultaneous fused fulfilment. An ascent out of mind is, for any greater realisation, imperative. Or else, there must be, with the ascent or consequent to it, a dynamic descent of the self-existent Truth that exists always uplifted in its own light above Mind, eternal, prior to the manifestation of Life and Matter.”
Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis of Yoga, Part One: The Yoga of Divine Works, Chapter 11, The Master of the Work, pp. 247-248
Sri Aurobindo Studies 