What in Ourselves Doesn’t Believe in Spite of All Experiences

 On another blog, which I usually enjoy reading because its short poems tend to be of the uplifting or at least amusing kind which I prefer to read, I have recently been shocked to find, after several other disappointing ones from time to time, a little piece that simply expressed total doubt in a benevolent God, and pointing out the many injustices happening all the time in this physical world, ended on this poignant question: ‘Why?’

Coming from any other blog, written by anyone else, that is, any spiritual newbie still hampered by remaining religious beliefs as well as by the growing lack of faith in them, I would have understood without problem how such a poem could have been not only written, but even posted on such a person’s blog. But knowing the writer to be really acquainted with the repeated experiences a spiritual seeker gets more and more of the true Reality, beyond and beneath the physical one our physical senses present to us as the only one, I just couldn’t fathom how such a confirmed spiritual explorer would still be expressing such deep doubts. That writer knows perfectly well of the reality of Divine Love, experiences it more or less all the time, feels herself more or less constantly in that Love, her central consciousness has explored and keeps exploring a number of other aspects of the multi-dimensional, total Reality… and yet, this is the kind of astonishing poem that pops up quite often in one form or the other, on the very same blog describing all tbe beautiful experiences, and in the same breath.

Such a surprising fact, coming up once again with this particularly negative post, puzzled me this time to the point that I wrote to that blogger about it. She kindly answered me what she could, which was convincing and satisfying for her but not at all for me, so in the end, as I was still mightily puzzled, I have put the question, as I usually do, straight to the Divine, and went to sleep for the night.

The next morning, I had a new awareness in me, providing what I felt was the answer.

During the night, my consciousness had become aware that this case of utter inner discrepancy was but a perfect example of something from the Mother I had precisely read only two days before this incredible post of that blogger came up – without me noticing at once the exact relevance of those observations by the Mother to that specific, puzzling post.

As relevant information to help my visitors too to understnd what probably happened in that other spiritual seeker, starting with a summary by me of the  teachings by Sri Aurobindo and the Mother that form the basis for the Integral Yoga of evolutive transformation they gave to humanity, down below you will also find quoted what the Mother was explaining specifically in the text I had just read:

Whether we have ourselves observed it yet or not, each of us human beings is composed of many parts, not all of them with the same degree of consciousness at all. Our present individuality is much more complex than we generally suppose: besides the soul deep within at the centre behind the superficial Emotional part, our individuality comprises also the three other main parts of our superficial being, that is, the Mental part for our thinking processes and beliefs, the Vital part for our life-energy and desires, and the Physical part, for our actual physical participation in this material world on earth.

Of all those various parts, only the soul is naturally eternal and still aware, even when embodied, of the Divine everywhere and in itself. All the other parts are formed only for one lifetime, each of these parts possibly remaining for more lifetimes only if that part has accepted in all its activities the inner guidance from the soul, and so has started sharing in the soul’s eternity. Otherwise, the superficial parts that continue to follow only the chaotic and erratic impulses of their own separate ego simply disintegrate with the death of the physical body.

Most people live in total ignorance and unawareness of those divisions in their individuality, and are usually aware only of the most dominant parts in themselves, those that clamor and fight the most loudly for the satisfaction of their own characteristic tendencies. Hence the inner struggles one starts encountering within, as soon as one awakens to the idea and the need of change, of inner progress.

Even when the soul at the center has finally managed to influence three of the four superficial parts – a feat which the usual ways of Yoga or spiritual paths have since long made possible at least to some extent – it only allows the soul to simply stop getting any further incarnations, and once the current physical body has died, to join again more or less permanently in the peaceful existence of the Ineffable Oneness beyond, in the non-physical dimensions of Reality – unless that ‘liberated’ soul realizes it can help others too to get ‘liberated’ as well, and it deliberately reincarnates again, for this compassionate purpose.

But with the discovery that there is upon Earth a gigantic process we call ‘Evolution’, and that this Evolution actually continues – whether we like it or not – towards new forms of Life beyond the ones we know (including our present human form), revealing more and more openly the Spirit within, nowadays the more complete Purpose of Life has become apparent, and Spirituality cannot any more be content with just escape from this physical world: the real aim of the Spirit within us who have embarked on this Adventure of Evolution obviously is not this escape, which leaves this physical world and its challenge unchanged; the real aim is of course the victorious attempt by the embodied Spirit to conquer and transform this world into a truly satisfying one, where a Life truly divine will become not only possible, but one day at last realized.

The Indian yogi Sri Aurobindo and his French spiritual collaborator the Mother, during their own recent respective lifetimes (1872-1950 and 1878-1973), have announced in their respective writings this evolutive future, and are also well-known the world over for the very special Ashram that formed around them because of the Divine Presence they radiated and the new form of Yoga they were living; but the most important part of their action for terrestrial evolution is still mostly unknown:

Over long decades of tremendously difficult inner work, and finally sacrificing his own physical body to attain this necessary result faster, Sri Aurobindo succeeded in bringing down from its very high spheres the ‘Supramental’ (=’Beyond the Mind’) Consciousness-Force that they knew was meant to replace the present Mental one as the leading Energy of Evolution here. Once this Supramental vibration was activated in this way right into terrestrial matter, the Mother, from 1956 to 1973 has pioneered the beginning of physical transformation through her own physical body, as recorded in her 13 volume ‘Agenda’ (French for ‘Diary’), down to the usually obscure but very real consciousness present even in the individual cells of any human body.

After the new step of Evolution had been actually started by both of them upon Earth towards that more complete goal, the human beings like myself here and there who are now orienting their own spiritual Quest towards that new goal are also starting to go deeper into their individual consciousness, beyond what used to be considered indispensable for the spiritual liberation: for it is more and more understood that the cellular consciousness too must be made to progress, as much as already possible, towards that now evolutive goal.

One important fact is that the cellular consciousness itself has its own subdivisions into mental, vital and physical levels as well: each cell, just like you and me, but on its own much smaller scale, somehow has its own Mental, Vital and Physical parts, each playing a role in the cell’s individual or collective reaction to each moment’s situation. At least, because the cells have in themselves almost no ego at all, the Mind in the cells is less rigid and crystallized than the main Mind part in ourselves, individual human beings with a much more developed ego. But our Physical Mind, the Mind of our body as a whole, the overall Mind of our body above the cellular level, is on the contrary by nature very much bound to its routine way of existing. Extremely reticent to accept the power of anything else but the so-called Laws of Nature as proclaimed today by official Science, this Physical Mind in us, because mostly of our very education and usual beliefs, obstinately doubts the superiority of any other power – even if that other Power has repeatedly shown its superiority to this Physical Mind through many direct experiences.

And it is at that point that the Mother’s observations (pages 178-179 of the French original) in the Volume I of what she called her ‘Agenda’ (‘Diary’), come handy for understanding better what may be happening in the overall consciousness of someone not yet aware of how fragmented that consciousness actually is, and not yet precisely conscious of exactly which part where is causing a certain problem, in this case the disbelief.

In the passage from Mother’s Agenda down below, the two lines in italics are questions from her interlocutor, the French disciple and confident she had named ‘Satprem’. Here goes:

July 2, 1958

Ramdas¹ must be a continuation of the line of Chaitanya, Ramakrishna, etc….

(silence)

A subject for this evening…

Something I have never said completely. On the one hand, there is the attitude of those in yesterday evening’s film:² God is everything, God is everywhere, God is in he who smites you (as Sri Aurobindo wrote – “God did  me good with a blow, shall I tell Him: O Mighty One, I forgive you your harm and cruelty but do not do it again!”), an attitude which, if extended to its ultimate conclusion, accepts the world as it is: the world is the perfect expression of the divine Will. On the other hand, there is the attitude of progress and transformation. But for that, you must recognize that there are things in the world which are not as they should be.

In The Synthesis of Yoga, Sri Aurobindo says that this idea of good and bad, of pure and impure, is a notion needed for action; but the purists, such as Chaitanya, Ramakrishna and others, do not agree. They do not agree that it is indispensable for action. They simply say: your acceptance of action as a necessary thing is contrary to your perception of the Divine in all things.

How can the two be reconciled?

I recall that once I tried to speak of this, but no one followed me, no one understood, so I did not insist. I left it open and never pursued it further, for they could not decipher anything or find any meaning in what I was saying. But now I could give a very simple answer: Let the Supreme do the work. It is He who has to progress, not you!

Ramdas does not at all consider that the world as it is, is good.

No, but I know all these people, I know them thoroughly! I know Chaitanya, Ramakrishna and Ramdas thoroughly. They are utterly familiar to me. It doesn’t bother them. These are people who live with a certain feeling, who have an entirely concrete experience and live in this experience, but they don’t care at all if their formation – they have not even crystallized it, they leave it like that, vague – contains things that are mutually contradictory, because, in appearance, they reconcile them. They do not raise any questions, they do not have the need for an absolutely clear vision; their feeling is absolutely clear, and that’s enough for them. Ramakrishna was like that; he said the most contradictory things without being bothered in the least, and they are all exactly and equally true.

But this crystal clear vision Sri Aurobindo had, where everything is in its place, where contradictions no longer exist – they never soared to that height. This was the thing, this really crystalline, perfect supramental vision, even from the standpoint of understanding and knowledge. They never went that far.   

                                                                                                                    (Mother’s Agenda, volume 1)

What this passage made me understand is that it seems my own individual consciousness is used also to have this kind of clarity in its perception of which part within itself has this or that reaction… and so I have come to unconsciously expect other spiritual seekers to have, and express, the same clarity in their own understanding of what is happening within themselves.

In the case of the blogger and genuine spiritual explorer who wrote that surprising poem, she probably doesn’t know it yet, but it is obviously, I would say, the Physical Mind only who is still the Doubter in her: the normal, main Mental part in her is probably convinced since long of the veracity and reality of the many experiences she has already had of the spiritual realms and of the Love of the Divine; but it is the little Physical Mind which in the obscurity of the night tends to take over and in the wee hours of the morning, as she describes, may whisper – or scream –  the basic disbelief and questioning that still is its own condition; it is not at all a central lack of faith, but a lack of faith or even of mere belief only in that Physical Mind, which irresistibly colors the feelings one finds oneself having at such times, when the overall consciousness is usually not at its highest.

So when this fellow blogger spoke to me of the ‘sincerity’ she must have, which is one reason why she thinks she must publish even these strange feelings she still finds herself having sometimes, I wouldn’t agree at all that by not pointing out such doubts she would be insincere: centrally she is definitely quite sincere in her soul’s quest and relationship to the Divine, a quest which probably includes her Mind as well by now. It is only in the most subconscious levels, thoseof the Physical Mind, that the disbelief and the obscure questions still remain.

It takes a very long time for the lack of faith to disappear completely in the Physical Mind.

Luckily for all of us who also include deliberately the cellular level of our being in our spiritual development, the Cellular Consciousness – or as Satprem used to put it in his own subsequent writings, ‘the Mind of the Cells’ – is relatively more open to believing in the reality of the beautiful spiritual experiences those cells too start having after some time; and the progresses in their tiny consciousnesses do help the more rigid Physical Mind to finally get ‘converted’ too, in the end.

Well, this then is one more very valid reason why anyone, even those who until now haven’t read much, if anything, about Cellular Consciousness, and who aren’t aware yet at that level of their being, could perhaps benefit from reading for example those of my posts here in which, like in this one, I explain or at least tell what it is like to be conscious – at least to some extent – of what is happening in one’s cells’ consciousness, in one area or the other of one’s body, or also sometimes everywhere at once in the body!… It can become such a wonderful addition to the other dimensions of our being that we may already be aware of…

May Sri Aurobindo’s “crystal vision”, as the Mother put it, help with its extraordinary precision the more complete inner development we all need for our full evolution, also towards the transformed body that the future holds for us!

At the core we are made of light, and light is the language by which our cells communicate…