The human mind starts from a basis of ignorance and uses its senses and powers of reasoning to try to piece together the truth of human existence and the truths of the created universe. It is necessarily limited, functions in a world of fragmentation and separation, and is unable to grasp the entirety and thus, misses the significance and meaning, as the whole is greater than the sum of the parts. No matter how much we search for a meaning by dissecting systems and looking at basic elements, we fail to gain any true understanding if we are unable to see the wholistic interaction and comprehensive relationships that hold everything together in a unified field. Recently quantum physicists have tried to find the answer to existence in studying the action of particles. Some astrophysicists have tried to find a “message” from the creator encoded in the background microwave radiation of the universe (but came up empty). This approach represents the mind straining for the meaning of existence that lies outside of its own powers of knowledge or perception, and it is doomed to fail in this attempt. The solution lies in the manifestation of the next level of consciousness and awareness that embodies powers and principles far beyond those of the mind, and which can see things through a different lens than the individual, fragmented, egoistic existence.
The supramental consciousness starts, not from the individual human egoistic viewpoint that necessarily fragments everything, but from a wider, embracing perspective that understands both the entirety of the whole, as well as the specific role and place for each part, act and event within the whole. It therefore is called by Sri Aurobindo a “truth-consciousness”, harking back to the Vedic sages who sought to realize the consciousness of “the truth, the right, the vast”.
Sri Aurobindo notes: “The Supermind is in its very essence a truth-consciousness, a consciousness always free from the Ignorance which is the foundation of our present natural or evolutionary existence and from which nature in us is trying to arrive at self-knowledge and world-knowledge and a right consciousness and the right use of our existence in the universe. The Supermind, because it is a truth-consciousness, has this knowledge inherent in it and this power of true existence; its course is straight and can go direct to its aim, its field is wide and can even be made illimitable. This is because its very nature is knowledge: it has not to acquire knowledge but possesses it in its own right; its steps are not from nescience or ignorance into some imperfect light, but from truth to greater truth, from right perception to deeper perception, from intuition to intuition, from illumuniation to utter and boundless luminousness, from growing widenesses to the utter vasts and to very infinitude. On its summits it possesses the divine omniscience and omnipotence, but even in an evolutionary movement of its own graded self-manifestation by which it would eventually reveal its own highest heights, it must be in its very nature essentially free from ignorance and error: it starts from truth and light and moves always in truth and light.”
Sri Aurobindo, The Mind of Light, Supermind and the Life Divine, pp. 63-64
Sri Aurobindo Studies 