The Yoga of Nature, Spiritual Sadhana and the Transformation of Action Into a Conscious Expression of the Divine Will

All life, our entire existence, whether we are actively involved in a conscious spiritual discipline, or living a ‘normal’ life in the world following the demands of our needs, desires, relationships and ambitions, etc. is a field of growth, experience and develop. We respond to opportunities, pressures, and difficulties and as we do so, some part of our being gathers that experience and grows through the process. This may be seen as a “yoga of Nature” which slowly builds up the various capacities and powers of each aspect of the being, and creates a maturation process that over time, and possibly over many lifetimes, brings about a higher level of awareness and consciousness in the responses and the actions of the individual.

For the spiritual seeker, this same process remains at work, with the added factor of the seeker being able to both observe and facilitate the process to speed up the long time-frame and thereby bring about growth of consciousness much more effectively and swiftly than the process of Nature. This is the “field of experience” that Sri Aurobindo refers to. it is the process by which Nature, or the conscious evolutionary focus of Yoga, challenges the exte
al being, the body, life and mind, to develop, grow and transform.

An entirely different process begins to take place as the seeker is able to shift the standpoint to the divine standpoint. At some point, the individual becomes, first, a conscious instrument manifesting the divine intention to a greater or lesser degree, and then later, when the ego-sheath has been fully dissolved, he becomes simply an expression of the divine action in the world.

Sri Aurobindo notes: “Work can be of two kinds — the work that is a field of experience used for the sadhana, for a progressive harmonisation and transformation of the being and its activities, and work that is a realised expression of the Divine. But the time for the latter can be only when the Realisation has been fully brought down into the earth-consciousness; till then all work must be a field of endeavour and a school of experience.”

We must find the Self, the Divine, then only can we know what is the work the Self or the Divine demands from us. Until then our life and action can only be a help or means towards finding the Divine and it ought not to have any other purpose. As we grow in the inner consciousness, or as the spiritual Truth of the Divine grows in us, our life and action must indeed more and more flow from that, be one with that. But to decide beforehand by our limited mental conception what they must be is to hamer the growth of the spiritual Truth within.”

Sri Aurobindo and the Mother, Looking from Within, Chapter 3, Action and Work, pp. 62-63