The Existence and Emergence of the Spiritual Consciousness : Sri Aurobindo
Thursday, June 11, 2020.
The understanding and acceptance of a pure mental consciousness and being, separate from the operations of the physical body or the life-force, was epitomized in the famous statement by Rene Descartes: “I think, therefore I am.” This self-awareness of a mental functioning that could be observed and participated could not be denied by any thinking human being. The identification of the essential being moved from the desire-ego of the life-energy to the newly identified awareness of the mental self.
We are at a time in the evolutionary cycle where we see individuals once again pressing forward and shifting their identification beyond the formation and action of the mental power to what is now being identified as a spiritual consciousness and being. While still in its early stages, it has become clear that for an increasing number of people, the identification with the mind is no longer the primary characteristic of their awareness. There is not only an existential awareness and an intuition of a greater existence than the individual human ego-personality, but an ever-increasing sense of oneness with the entire creation and the being that is and expresses pure consciousness, through a knowledge by identity rather than through ideation.
Sri Aurobindo observes in The Life Divine: “When there is the decisive emergence, one sign of it is the status or action in us of an inherent, intrinsic, self-existent consciousness which knows itself by the mere fact of being, knows all that is in itself in the same way by identity with it, begins even to see all that to our mind seems external in the same manner, by a movement of identity or by an intrinsic direct consciousness which envelops, penetrates, enters into its object, discovers itself in the object, is aware in it of something that is not mind or life or body. There is, then, evidently a spiritual consciousness which is other than the mental, and it testifies to the existence of a spiritual being in us which is other than our surface mental personality.”
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