Under normal circumstances the human being, operating on the level of mental, vital and physical action, is actually impelled by mechanical forces or universal energies working through these gradations of consciousness. Even when we believe we are acting “freely”, the action is conditioned by the force and patterns of habit that characterise life in the world. In order to gain any freer power of initiation, it is necessary for the human instrument to become an instrument of the higher powers of consciousness. “for it is when it becomes an instrumentation of a higher instead of a lower Power that the will of the being becomes free from a mechanical determinism by action and process of cosmic Mind-Energy, Life-Energy, Matter-Energy and an ignorant subjection to the drive of this inferior Nature.”
The individual, as the consciousness expands and contact is made with the spiritual and overmental/supramental ranges, can transfer its action from one that is strictly circumscribed to one that has freedom and expanded scope due to the identification with the higher powers which then use the individual as a type of “nexus” of action to express that higher consciousness. This converts the entire meaning of the individual life and action away from that of the human personality to a conscious instrument of the higher nature that is evolving. “All the processes of the evolution would be felt as the action of a supreme and universal Consciousness, a supreme and universal Force working in whatever way it chose, on whatever level, within whatever self-determined limits, a conscious working of the transcendent and cosmic Being, the action of the omnipotent and omniscient World-Mother raising the being into herself, into her Supernature. In place of the Nature of Ignorance with the individual as its closed field and unconscious or half-conscious instrument, there would be a Supernature of the divine Gnosis and the individual soul would be its conscious, open and free field and instrument, a participant in its action, aware of its purpose and process, aware too of its own greater Self, the universal, the transcendent Reality, and of its own Person as illitably one with that and yet an individual being of Its being, an instrument and a spiritual centre.”
Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine, Book 2, Part 2, Chapter 26, “The Ascent Towards Supermind”
Sri Aurobindo Studies 