The Mind Cannot Judge or Understand the Supreme Divine Shakti

As mental beings, we try to understand and judge what we see and experience by the power of the mind. For many purposes, of course, this seems to work just fine, particularly when we are looking at practical arrangements in the material world. However, it is not possible to adequately grasp nor judge the powers that operate above the mind by mental parameters. We try to set rules and fixed ways of seeing things, while the spiritual force far exceeds and has far more complexity than it is possible for the mind to comprehend.

We find this whenever the mind tries to grapple with complexity such as the functioning of the human body or the balance of the entire eco-sphere of the planet, or even the subatomic forces of the material plane. When we try to act from the limited mental understanding we invariably find that there are numerous “unintended consequences” that arise, representing the level intelligence of the universal manifestation going beyond the mind’s framework.

Sri Aurobindo makes this same point in relation to the action of the Divine Shakti. “But be on your guard and do not try to understand and judge the Divine Mother by your little earthly mind that loves to subject even the things that are beyond it to its own norms and standards, its narrow reasonings and erring impressions, its bottomless aggressive ignorance and its petty self-confident knowledge. The human mind shut in the prison of its half-lit obscurity cannot follow the many-sided freedom of the steps of the Divine Shakti. The rapidity and complexity of her vision and action outrun its stumbling comprehension; the measures of her movement are not its measures. Bewildered by the swift alteration of her many different personalities, her making of rhythms and her breaking of rhythms, her accelerations of speed and her retardations, her varied ways of dealing with the problem of one and of another, her taking up and dropping now of this line and now of that one and her gathering of them together, it will not recognise the way of the Supreme Power when it is circling and sweeping upwards through the maze of the Ignorance to a supernal Light.”

It is through the soul’s receptivity, the psychic being’s openness, that one can feel and experience the inner Truth of the method and action of the Divine Shakti.

Sri Aurobindo,