The Silence of the Mind and the Divine Transformation of the Lower Nature :

The object of the silencing of the mind is to detach it from the impulses and promptings of the lower nature and adjust the standpoint to the “divine standpoint”.  The mind, no longer occupied entirely with sense impressions, impulses, desires and plans from the human standpoint, can take on a new role of interpreting and directing the higher knowledge and will down to transform the action of the body, life and mind itself.  Sri Aurobindo observes that once this status is achieved, “strenuous concentration will be found no longer necessary.”

“A free concentration of will using thought merely for suggestion and the giving of light to the lower members will take its place.  This Will will then insist on the physical being, the vital existence, the heart and the mind remoulding themselves in the forms of the Divine which reveal themselves out of the silent Brahman.”

It is this pressure from above, working through the silent mind, that effects the transformation sought in the integral Yoga, the conversion of all actions and energies of life into a manifestation of the Divine purpose.  “By swifter or slower degrees according to the previous preparation and purification of the members, they will be obliged with more or less struggle to obey the law of the will and its thought-suggestion, so that eventually the knowledge of the Divine takes possession of our consciousness on all its planes and the image of the Divine is formed in our human existence even as it was done by the old Vedic Sadhakas.  For the integral Yoga this is the most direct and powerful discipline.”

Sri Aurobindo