Finding a Solution that Provides Peace Without Sacrificing Progress in the Universal Manifestation

If the drive towards progress is fueled by dissatisfaction and anxiety felt by the individual, we are left with the concern that achieving peace must come at the cost of giving up the active life and the development of consciousness in the world. We either have to sink back to the level of the animal who does not worry about the past or the future, and who lives in a relatively static consciousness, or find a way to escape the world, through renunciation and entering into a form of trance state based in the highest, but not attempting to modify or update the outer consciousness. Both of these methods, however, leave the drive embedded in the very essence of the human soul unfulfilled and thus, cannot be the complete solution to carrying out the significance of our existence.

Sri Aurobindo and the Mother propose a different solution. All of the above noted attempts to achieve peace are rooted in the ego-consciousness. They propose shifting the standpoint of consciousness to a higher level, aligned with the supreme consciousness that manifests the universal creation, and from that standpoint, peace comes from an absolute trust and faith in that creation and the role the individual is intended to play in carrying out the manifestation. Once the burden of action is shifted from the ego to the universal, there is no longer the pressure, nor any cause for anxiety. Thus, peace can be achieved in the consciousness of the individual without abandoning the drive towards the evolution of consciousness inherent in the human soul.

The Mother observes: “That is why all spiritual disciplines begin with the necessity of surrendering all responsibility and relying on a higher principle. Otherwise peace is impossible. … And yet, consciousness has been given to man so that he can progress, can discover what he doesn’t know, develop into what he has not yet become; and so it may be said that there is a higher state than that of an immobile and static peace: it is a trust total enough for one to keep the will to progress, to preserve the effort for progress while ridding it of all anxiety, all care for results and consequences. This is one step ahead of the methods which may be called ‘quietist’, which are founded on the rejection of all activity and a plunging into an immobility and inner silence, which forsake all life because it has been suddenly felt that without peace one can’t have any inner realisation and, quite naturally, one thought that one couldn’t have peace so long as one was living in outer conditions, in the state of anxiety in which problems are set and cannot be solved, for one does not have the knowledge to do so.”

“The next step is to face the problem, but with the calm and certitude of an absolute trust in the supreme Power which knows, and can make you act. And then, instead of abandoning action, one can act in a higher peace that is strong and dynamic. … This is what could be called a new aspect of the divine intervention in life, a new form of intervention of the divine forces in existence, a new aspect of spiritual realisation.”

Sri Aurobindo and The Mother, Living Within: The Yoga Approach to Psychological Health and Growth, Disturbances of Mind, Anxiety, pp. 44-49

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The Human Dilemma: the Underlying Cause of Anxiety

Being human is uncomfortable. We do not have the innocence of living that we find in the animal kingdom. We struggle with the pressure of growing knowledge about ourselves and our world, and an awareness of past, present and future that haunts us all the time. For many, this pressure is so unbearable that they choose to try to obliterate the awareness through various forms of dissipation, self-medication with alcohol or drugs, or through an attempt to regain the animal innocence by living in the present, care-free and oblivious, which, of course, is an illusion.

There is however a deeper significance to the dissatisfaction of humanity, and the anxiety that arises. Those that are satisfied generally remain fixed in their ‘status quo’. The force for development, progress and change occurs through the impetus of dissatisfaction with the current state of things. Thus, humanity is considered to be transitional and evolutionary in principle, and the dissatisfaction and anxiety that accompanies it represents the force that brings about evolutionary growth. It is said in the traditional scriptures that even the Gods, if they wish to make evolutionary progress, must take a human birth! The Gods are static beings at a higher vibrational level, to be sure, just as animals are static beings, at a lower vibrational level, than the human incarnation.

The Mother writes: “Of course, it is impossible for man to fall back to the level of the animal and lose the consciousness he has acquired; therefore, for him there is only one means, one way to get out of this condition he is in, which I call a miserable one, and to emerge into a higher state where worry is replaced by a trusting surrender and the certitude of a luminous culmination — this way is to change the consciousness.”

“Truly speaking there is no condition more miserable than being responsible for an existence to which one doesn’t have the key, that is, of which one doesn’t have the threads that can guide and solve the problems. The animal sets itself no problems: it just lives. Its instinct drives it, it relies on a collective consciousness which has an innate knowledge and is higher than itself, but it is automatic, spontaneous, it has no need to will something and make an effort to bring it about, it is quite naturally like that, and as it is not responsible for its life, it does not worry. With man is born the sense of having to depend on himself, and as he does not have the necessary knowledge the result is a perpetual torment. This torment can come to an end only with a total surrender to a higher consciousness than his own to which he can totally entrust himself, hand over his worries and leave the care of guiding his life and organising everything.”

“How can a problem be solved when one doesn’t have the necessary knowledge? And the unfortunate thing is that man believes that he has to resolve all the problems of his life, and he does not have the knowledge needed to do it. That is the source, the origin of all his troubles — that perpetual question, ‘What should I do? …’ which is followed by another one still more acute, ‘What is going to happen?’ and at the same time, more or less, the inability to answer.”

Sri Aurobindo and The Mother, Living Within: The Yoga Approach to Psychological Health and Growth, Disturbances of Mind, Anxiety, pp. 44-49

Man: the Being Who Worries

Anxiety arises when we extrapolate from a current circumstance or event to what we anticipate, imagine or speculate will follow. Some of this speculation is logical, following what we know of the method of Nature and the rollout of events through Time, although there is no absolute certainty about the logical result as there are too many unseen and unknown factors which can intervene at any moment. For example, we are driving a short distance on an errand and we expect to arrive in a few minutes’ time with no issues arising. However, we cannot know that a water line break will close the road ahead of us, that we will become mired in traffic that does not move, and that as a result we will miss our intended destination that day. The power of imagination, even if it is initially based on some logical inferential process, is just as likely to be inaccurate as accurate.

The animal kingdom, as far as we can tell, lives in the present time, experiencing life and not worrying about ‘what if’ scenarios. The human individual actually attends to the present with an ever-present burden of the past and an ever-present sense of the future. As a result, we carry into the present, the concerns, issues and fears that developed in the past, as well as the anxiety about what the future will hold. We worry about things that happened in the past even though we cannot go back and change them, in addition to worrying about what may happen in the future. This is what makes the human individual suffer far more intensely than our animal brethren.

As long as we remain rooted in this mental realm of speculative imagination of the future that will unroll before us, there is no simple solution. The developed mental consciousness is locked into this power and gains both its benefits and its drawbacks and limitations.

Sri Aurobindo notes that the mental consciousness, and the human being embodying the mental consciousness, represents a transitional phase in the evolution of consciousness. These powers brought progress and some real benefits with them, but we now experience with great intensity the negative aspects and limiting factors, indicating that it is time to move to a new level and type of consciousness which is not so wrapped up in the worry of the ego-personality about its own future. The next phase of evolution Sri Aurobindo has named the supramental consciousness, which grasps the movement of time as a unified whole, and participates in the universal manifestation on a conscious and fully engaged level. At this level, there is no cause for either speculation or worry.

This does not mean that circumstances or events may not block the way forward, or create obstacles to overcome; however, the awareness of the eventual conclusion and the need for patience and persistence in the effort overcomes the fear of failure and the worry about the future that accompanies everything in the human world.

The Mother notes: “It is obvious that what especially characterises man is this mental capacity of watching himself live. The animal lives spontaneously, automatically, and if it watches itself live, it must be to a very minute and insignificant degree, and that is why it is peaceful and does not worry. Even if an animal is suffering because of an accident or an illness, this suffering is reduced to a minimum by the fact that it does not observe it, does not project it in its consciousness and into the future, does not imagine things about its illness or its accident.”

“With man there has begun this perpetual worrying about what is going to happen, and this worry is the principal, if not the sole cause of his torment. With this objectivising consciousness there has begun anxiety, painful imaginations, worry, torment, anticipation of future catastrophes, with the result that most men — and not the least conscious, the most conscious — live in perpetual torment. Man is too conscious to be indifferent, he is not conscious enough to know what will happen. Truly it could be said without fear of making a mistake that of all earth’s creatures he is the most miserable. The human being is used to being like that because it is an atavistic state which he has inherited from his ancestors, but it is truly a miserable condition. And it is only with this spiritual capacity of rising to a higher level and replacing the animal’s consciousness by a spiritual super-consciousness that there comes into the being not only the capacity to see the goal of existence and to foresee the culmination of the effort but also a clear-sighted trust in a higher spiritual power to which one can surrender one’s whole being, entrust oneself, give the responsibility for one’s life and future and so abandon all worries.”

Sri Aurobindo and The Mother, Living Within: The Yoga Approach to Psychological Health and Growth, Disturbances of Mind, Anxiety, pp. 44-49