The Divine Intention and Will Goes Beyond the Human Ability to Conceive and Grasp It

We try to judge situations and events from our human understanding. We do not generally see the chain of cause and effect that led to a specific circumstance, nor the impact of the result that we observe on future events. We see things from our own narrow egoistic viewpoint and judge them based on our own desires, wishes or trained ways of analyzing them.

Even when we try to see behind the exte
al action to the hidden sense, we use our human mode of understanding to interpret what we are seeing. We speak of the ‘law of karma’ as if there is some kind of immediate or eventual direct retribution to someone who does something we judge to be wrong or immoral; and conversely, we expect an eventual reward for someone who does what we judge to be positive actions. Yet the law of karma is clearly not so neatly organized as to fit into our limited judgment frame. In his book Rebirth and Karma, for instance, Sri Aurobindo describes the lines of karma and the higher lines of karma in terms that differ greatly from the popular notions about how karma operates.

The divine creation moves on different timelines, and with vastly different purposes than what any individual can see from his own limited lifetime and standpoint. When we look at the time frames needed for the evolutionary process alone, consisting of billions of years, and try to compare it to the motives and actions we can conceptualize in our short span of years which do not even represent a ’rounding error’ in the scale of the universal manifestation, we quickly realize that we are not in a position to judge any of these things as long as we remain anchored to our small, comfortable and limited human forms of understanding.

Where does this leave us in our attempt to grow spiritually and align ourselves with the divine Will? At that point, when we surrender our attempt to define God by our mental conceptions, we begin to act from the higher wisdom based in aspiration, receptivity and the deeper faith that is the light of the soul shining through our limited human mentality and vital nature.

Sri Aurobindo observes: “The ways of the Divine are not like those of the human mind or according to our patterns and it is impossible to judge them or to lay down for Him what He shall or shall not do, for the Divine knows better than we can know. If we admit the Divine at all, both true reason and bhakti seem to me to be at one in demanding implict faith and surrender.”

Sri Aurobindo, Bases of Yoga, Chapter 2, Faith — Aspiration — Surrender, pg. 23