Necessity of the Spiritual Transformation of Life

When we look at the immensity of the evolutionary crisis, and the failure of “tried and true” solutions that have been put forward through history, it is easy to become discouraged and pessimistic about the possibility of survival. The solution proposed, a radical transformation of human life and nature based on the emergence of the spiritual self, seems difficult, if not impossible to achieve.

Sri Aurobindo comments on this issue: “Even if it were so, it would still remain the sole possibility for the transmutation of life; for to hpe for a true change of human life without a change of human nature is an irrational and unspiritual proposition; it is to ask for something unnatural and unreal, an impossible miracle.”

The methodology of Nature, as we have seen earlier, is to effect its transformations through creation of an ultimate tension of opposites, out of which a new form or synthesis can then emerge. We have seen the emergence of the vital, and then the mental consciousness out of Matter. The methodology of Nature, and a review of this past evolutionary development, makes it clear that just such a transformation is both the necessity and the sense of the current extreme crisis.

“It is, besides, a step for which the whole of evolution has been a preparation and which is brought closer at each crisis of human destiny when the mental and vital evolution of the being touches a point where intellect and vital force reach some acme of tension and there is a need either for them to collapse, to sink back into a torpor of defeat or a repose of unprogressive quiescence or to rend their way through the veil against which they are straining.”

In order to achieve this transformation Sri Aurobindo describes the necessary steps: “What is necessary is that there should be a turn in humanity felt by some or many towards the vision of this change, a feeling of its imperative need, the sense of its possibility, the will to make it possible in themselves and to find the way.”

Sri Aurobindo also reminds us: “That trend is not absent and it must increase with the tension of the crisis in human world-destiny; the need of an escape or a solution, the feeling that there is no other solution than the spiritual cannot but grow and become more imperative under the urgency of critical circumstance. To that call in the being there must always be some answer in the Divine Reality and in Nature.”

Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine, Book 2, Part 2, Chapter 28, “The Divine Life”, pg. 1059-1060