Spiritual Experience Transcends the Mind’s Understanding

The mind cannot comprehend experiences with which it has no familiarity. Sri Aurobindo describes a spiritual status that is experiential in nature. When there is such an experience, the mind tries to describe or transcribe that experience into its normal process of linear thought expressed in words. Usually this transcription process falls far short and the mind is left with a confused and vague sense that there is something beyond its realm.

Until the seeker is able himself to shift to spiritual experience, true understanding is not really possible; but once that happens, the transcription provided by Sri Aurobindo here suddenly makes sense. This is like the difference between having a map that outlines a path through a forest, versus actually traversing the forest. The map is a two-dimensional representation, necessarily incomplete and vague when it comes to the actual path and its three-dimensional reality and the experience of traversing that path.

A disciple asks: “Sweet Mother, I don’t understand ‘the strong immobility of an immortal spirit. (Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis of Yoga)

The Mother observes: “What is it you don’t understand? That an immortal spirit has a strong immobility? It says what it means. An immortal spirit is necessarily immobile and strong, by the very fact of its being immortal.”

“For this is a fact, it’s like that. When the spirit is conscious of immortality, it becomes an immobility all made of strength. Immobility — that is to say, it doesn’t move any longer, but it is a strong immobility, it is not an immobility of inertia or impotence; it is a strong immobility which is a basis for action, that is, all one does founds itself upon this powerful — all-powerful — immobility of the spirit that is immortal.”

“But you see, there is no explanation which can give you that; you must have the experience, one can’t understand what this means…. And it is the same for everything: the head, the little brain, cannot understand. The minute one has the experience, one understands — not before. One may have a sort of imaginative idea, but this is not understanding. To understand one must live it. When you become conscious of your immortal spirit, you will know what its strong immobility is — but not before. Otherwise, these are mere words.”

“You don’t understand how one can be immobile and strong at the same time, is that what is bothering you? Well, I reply that the greatest strength is in immobility. That is the sovereign power.”

Sri Aurobindo and the Mother, Powers Within, Chapter XII Power of Immobility, pp. 99-100