With all of its impressive powers, the mind has been unable to even remotely approach the creation of a divine life on earth. We make progress in our technology and create labor-saving devices, enhanced material comforts and advancements in medicine, but none of these things bring us any closer to a solution. On the contrary, the standpoint of the separate individual and the fragmented view of reality that come with the mental view have created unintended consequences that are poisoning the planet, disrupting the natural balance, radically changing the climate, and causing untold misery as we fight over resources and ideologies that arise from different viewpoints about the meaning of life and how to organize it. We may call this “the best of times and the worst of times” to paraphrase Charles Dickens. We have comfort, we have enjoyment of entertainment, we have the access to new medical options that extend life and help comfort us through our illnesses and injuries. We have the ability to communicate and travel throughout the world. We can offset cold weather or warm with heating and air conditioning. We have a bounty of food and drinks never before imaginable. And yet, we are in the midst of one of the largest, if not the absolute largest, species “die off” in earth’s history, we are on the brink of planetary destruction, or at least the destruction of a livable planet, and we are quickly heading to a situation where enormous masses of our ever-growing population are suffering from hunger, ravaged by disease, unable to get basic food, water and shelter, and are set upon by warfare and disruption so that mass migrations are spawned, which in themselves breed resistance from those living in lands that are the recipients of the refugees.
To speak of a divine life in such an environment seems incredulous, but Sri Aurobindo has provided the key to the mystery. We are not going to achieve unity, peace, harmony and balance through the divided, separated, fragmented consciousness of the Mind-Life-Body, and the ego-standpoint that accompanies their action. What is needed is the manifestation of a new consciousness that starts from the view and standpoint of unity, what we may call the “divine standpoint” and which then understands and sees the relevance, position and balance in our interactive existence on earth. All life is one, and once we begin to see and act from this standpoint, we can begin to create a divine existence where all are respected and treated as part of the larger, indivisible whole that is the earthly life.
Sri Aurobindo writes: “The manifestation of a supramental truth-consciousness is therefore the capital reality that will make the divine life possible. It is when all the movements of thought, impulse and action are governed and directed by a self-existent and luminously automatic truth-consciousness and our whole nature comes to be constituted by it and made of its stuff tht the life divine will be complete and absolute. Even as it is, in reality though not in the appearance of things, it is a secret self-existent knowledge and truth that is working to manifest itself in the creation here. The Divine is already there immanent within us, ourselves are that in our inmost reality and it is this reality that we have to manifest; it is that which constitutes the urge towards the divine living and makes necessary the creation of the life divine even in this material existence.”
Sri Aurobindo, The Mind of Light, Supermind and the Life Divine, pg. 65
Sri Aurobindo Studies 