The Physical Consciousness: Abandon or Transform?

Through long habit, spiritual seekers tend to look at the question of how to attain spiritual liberation involving abandonment of the exte
al life in the world. Not only spiritual seekers raise this question in some form or another. Anyone involved in aesthetic, mental, artistic, or emotional or vital pursuits eventually tries to find ways to overcome the limits and restraints of the physical, material consciousness. Clearly, there is an element of truth in the need to be able to move beyond these limitations if one wants to achieve anything in the vital, mental or spiritual aspects of one’s life. Yet it is not a complete truth, as it condemns the universal creation to some kind of irrelevancy or illusive distraction from these higher pursuits.

Sri Aurobindo reviews this issue in depth in The Life Divine. He comes to a different conclusion about the goal of the spiritual seeking by taking us through the human aspiration to the two basic opposite viewpoints, that of the materialist who fixes himself upon success in the exte
al world, and that of the ascetic, who focuses on the spiritual. His conclusion is that there is no necessary separation. The universal manifestation is an ‘omnipresent reality’ which encompasses all aspects of life. As the seeker begins to appreciate and understand this unified view, this ‘continuum’ betwee
Matter and Spirit, the question is not so much how to abandon the physical consciousness, but how to transform it to reveal the spiritual reality that permeates and creates it.

A disciple inquires: “How should we come out of the physical consciousness which keeps us preoccupied all the time and exclusively with physical circumstances?”

The Mother observes: “There is a considerable number of ways. There are intellectual ways, ways of which may be called sentimental, artistic ways and spiritual ways. And generally, it is preferable for each one to take the way that is easiest for him, for if one wants to begin straight away with the most difficult, one comes to nothing at all. And here we always come back to the same thing, to what Sri Aurobindo describes in The Synthesis of Yoga: it is the way of knowledge or the way of devotion or the way of works. But the way of works is precisely the one which keeps you in physical life and makes you find your liberation in it; and perhaps this is the most effective way of all but also the most difficult.”

“For most aspirants the way of meditation, concentration, withdrawal from physical life, rejection of physical activities is certainly easier than the way of action. But they leave the physical consciousness just as it is, without ever changing it, and unless one becomes like a sadhu or an ascetic who leaves behind all active life and remains in constant concentration or meditation, one achieves nothing at all. That is to say, an entire part of the being is never transformed. And for them the solution is not at all to transform it, it is simply to reject it, to get out of their body as quickly as possible. That is how yoga was conceived of formerly, for, obviously, it is much easier. But this is not what we want.”

“What we want is the transformation of the physical consciousness, not its rejection. And so, in this case, what Sri Aurobindo has recommended as the most direct and most total way is surrender to the Divine — a surrender made more and more integral, progressively, comprising the physical consciousness and physical activities. And if one succeeds in this, then the physical, instead of being an obstacle, becomes a help.”

Sri Aurobindo and the Mother, Our Many Selves: Practical Yogic Psychology, Chapter 2, Planes and Parts of the Being, pp. 25-26