The Higher Reason Helps Manage the Vital and Physical Nature Thus Maintaining Its Important Role Until the Psychic Being Can Take Total Charge of the External Being

The development of the mental consciousness, and in particular, the higher Reason, has acted as a corrective power to direct, manage and control the vital nature with its passions, and its seemingly random outbursts in one direction or another. Reason embodies the action of Sattwa to tamp down on the raging of Rajas which is the characteristic Guna influencing the vital nature. In the evolutionary process, Reason has been and remains an important aspect of the development of consciousness and its expression on earth.

Many people who take up the spiritual path tend to look down on Reason as it is itself a limiting factor on the higher ranges of consciousness, the Inspired Mind, the Intuitive Mind, and beyond. Because of the limitations of the mental consciousness itself, Reason also suffers from a partial understanding which can become ossified and rigid if applied to a narrow or dogmatic viewpoint. It is for this reason that Sri Aurobindo noted, in one of his aphorisms that “Reason was the helper, reason is the bar.”

The question that arises, however, is the transition from Reason to some higher state of understanding. It is the psychic consciousness that creates a pathway to the higher evolutionary stages for the human being. Therefore, many feel that Reason must be abandoned in order to achieve a psychic or spiritual state of consciousness. This approach, however, leads to the potential uprising of the vital nature, and gives that nature the opportunity to confuse, distort or sully the spiritual awareness by mixing in its vital motivations and satisfactions and using the absence of the Reason as a means for inserting its own agenda.

The successive stages of consciousness did not eliminate the prior stages, but brought them into a new integrated and complex relationship. The action of these earlier stages was modified to optimize the positive benefits while limiting the negative points. The same could be said about the role of the higher Reason as the psychic being comes to the fore and begins to gain ascendency over the earlier stages of mind, life and body.

The Mother writes: “The reign of reason should not end until the coming of the psychic law which manifests the Divine Will.”

reference: Sri Aurobindo and the Mother, The Psychic Being — Soul: Its Nature, Mission and Evolution, Section 6 More Lights on the Psychic Being, pp. 175-176