Our Spiritual Destiny

There are various views about the meaning and purpose of our lives. For those who believe that we are trapped in our imperfect nature and that we cannot develop beyond the limitations of the body, life and mind into something that has the character of Knowledge rather than Ignorance, there is no use or hope in striving to achieve the kind of spiritual, supramental evolutionary development that Sri Aurobindo envisions. Similarly there are those who believe that other results beyond the current limitations we experience are possible, but not here and now, in this life; rather, only in some “beyond” whether it is another world, or a heaven after death.

Sri Aurobindo takes issue with both of these views. He sees life and its striving as expression of an evolutionary development, and our current limitations as a stage through which we must pass, but to which we are not, in the end, eternally bound.

He discusses the issue as follows: “If our nature is fixed in what it is, what it has already become, then no perfection, no real and enduring happiness is possible in earthly life….But if in us there is a spiritual being which is emerging and our present state is only an imperfection or half-emergence, if the Inconscient is a starting-point containing in itself the potency of a Superconscience and Supernature which has to evolve, a veil of apparent Nature in which that greater consciousness is concealed and from which it has to unfold itself, if an evolution of being is the law, then what we are seeking for is not only possible but part of the eventual necessity of things. It is our spiritual destiny to manifest and become that Supernature,–for it is the nature of our true self, our still occult, because unevolved, whole being. A nature of unity will then bring inevitably its life-result of unity, mutuality, harmony. An inner life awakened to a full consciousness and to a full power of consciousness will bear its inevitable fruit in all who have it, self-knowledge, a perfected existence, the joy of a satisfied being, the happiness of a fulfilled nature.”

Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine, Book 2, Part 2, Chapter 28, “The Divine Life”