For most people, the idea of the Spirit, or God, is something separate and apart from our life in the world. We conceive of heaven above us with a Creator God seated on a throne, or we conceive of the spiritual truth of the universe as only knowable if we abandon our life and action in the world. Many believe the world is a cheat or an illusion, nowadays there are those who believe we are simply living inside a computer game that has no reality. These limitations cause us to seek our spiritual realization and salvation through abandonment of the world and its objects.
Sri Aurobindo examines these limitations of the mental viewpoint as he continues to review the objections raised about the reality and possibility of a supramental transformation of our life on earth.
Sri Aurobindo writes: “The whole trouble of this incertitude arises from the fact that we do not look straight at the whole truth of the world as it is and draw from it the right conclusion as to what the world must be and cannot fail to be. This world is, no doubt, based ostensibly upon Matter, but its summit is Spirit and the ascent towards Spirit must be the aim and justification of its existence and the pointer to its meaning and purpose. But the natural conclusion to be drawn from the supremacy and summit existence of Spirit is clouded by a false or imperfect idea of spirituality which has been constructed by intellect in its ignorance and even by its too hasty and one-sided grasp at knowledge. The Spirit has been thought of not as something all-pervading and the secret essence of our being, but as something only looking down on us from the heights and drawing us only towards the heights and away from the rest of existence. So we get the idea of our cosmic and individual being as a great illusion, and departure from it and extinction in our consciousness of both individual and cosmos as the only hope, the sole release. Or we build up the idea of the earth as a world of ignorance, suffering and trial and our only future an escape into heavens beyond; there is no divine prospect for us here, no fulfillment possible even with the utmost evolution on earth in the body, no victorious transformation, no supreme object to be worked out in terrestrial existence.”
Sri Aurobindo, The Mind of Light, Supermind in Evolution, pg. 86
Sri Aurobindo Studies 