The Spiritual Consciousness Brings a Vast Peace as a Foundation for the Transformation of the Nature

The mind cannot adequately create, imagine, describe or image the experience of the descent of peace and vastness that takes hold of the being and superimposes itself over the activities of the mind, life and body. Until one has the actual experience, therefore, nothing specific can be said about it. When an individual has this experience, there is a strong pressure on the body-life-mind complex and if it is not adequately prepared to ‘hold’ the energy, there is always an attempt to explain it, describe it, or get insight about it. This is the characteristic action of the mind trying to convert it into a symbolic representation that can be explained and expressed.

The spiritual consciousness, as it begins to actively descend into a receptive individual, carries out its own development in its own way and time, and brings with it the ‘atmosphere’ natural to its own state.

The experience of the spiritual plane as it descends into the human instrument is a first stage, not a consummation. The peace, the connection to the vastness of the universal Presence, are powers that support the slow process of change that comes about whenever a next phase of the evolution of consciousness begins to manifest and insert itself into the earth-nature. The complete transformation involves overcoming long-embedded and fixed habits of body, life and mind that have developed over hundreds of millions or even billions of years in the earth nature, uplifting and transforming them. A virtually endless patience is required. The first thing the spiritual consciousness provides then is the sense of peace and ete
ity that removes the vital and mental frustrations that would otherwise disrupt the process due to how slow and difficult the change process actually turns out to be.

Sri Aurobindo notes: “A great wave (or sea) of calm and the constant consciousness of a vast and luminous Reality — this is precisely the character of the fundamental realisation of the Supreme Truth in its first touch on the mind and the soul. One could not ask for a better beginning or foundation — it is like a rock on which the rest can be built. It means certainly not only a Presence, but the Presence — and it would be a great mistake to weaken the experience by any non-acceptance or doubt of its character.”

“It is not necessary to define it and one ought not even to try to turn it into an image; for this Presence is in its nature infinite. Whatever it has to manifest of itself or out of itself, it will do inevitably by its own power, if there is a sustained acceptance.”

“It is quite true that it is a grace sent and the only return needed for such a grace is acceptance, gratitude and to allow the Power that has touched the consciousness to develop what has to be developed in the being — by keeping oneself open to it. The total transformation of the nature cannot be done in a moment; it must take long and proceed through stages; what is now experienced is only an initiation, a foundation for the new consciousness in which that transformation will become possible. The automatic spontaneity of the experience ought by itself to show that it is nothing constructed by the mind, will or emotions; it comes from a Truth that is beyond them.”

Sri Aurobindo, Bases of Yoga, Chapter 1, Calm — Peace — Equality, pp. 4-5