The Human Power of Discontentedness Helps Open the Door to the Inner Consciousness

The drive in the human individual to find out who he is, what he is here for, and how he can grow and become what he is intended to be in the creation sets him apart from the animal. Even in the midst of an almost complete immersion in the external life and its lures, somewhere deep inside, the person knows that this is not all, that this is not enough, and eventually, this brings about a sense of dissatisfaction or discontentedness which pushes him beyond the limits set by the body, life-force and mind.

Sri Aurobindo begins The Life Divine with the following: “The earliest preoccupation of man in his awakened thoughts and, as it seems, his inevitable and ultimate preoccupation, —for it survives the longest periods of scepticism and returns after every banishment,—is also the
highest which his thought can envisage. It manifests itself in the divination of Godhead, the impulse towards perfection, the search after pure Truth and unmixed Bliss, the sense of a secret immortality. The ancient dawns of human knowledge have left us their witness to this constant aspiration; today we see a humanity satiated but not satisfied by victorious analysis of the externalities of Nature preparing to return to its primeval longings. The earliest formula of Wisdom promises to be its last, —God, Light, Freedom, Immortality.”

“These persistent ideals of the race are at once the contradiction of its normal experience and the affirmation of higher and deeper experiences which are abnormal to humanity and
only to be attained, in their organised entirety, by a revolutionary individual effort or an evolutionary general progression. To know, possess and be the divine being in an animal and egoistic consciousness, to convert our twilit or obscure physical mentality into the plenary supramental illumination, to build peace and a self-existent bliss where there is only a stress of transitory satisfactions besieged by physical pain and emotional suffering,
to establish an infinite freedom in a world which presents itself as a group of mechanical necessities, to discover and realise the immortal life in a body subjected to death and constant mutation, —this is offered to us as the manifestation of God in Matter and the goal of Nature in her terrestrial evolution. To the ordinary material intellect which takes its present organisation of consciousness for the limit of its possibilities, the direct contradiction of the unrealised ideals with the realised fact is a final argument against their validity. But if we take a more deliberate view of the world’s workings, that direct opposition appears rather as part of Nature’s profoundest method and the seal of her completest sanction. “

“For all problems of existence are essentially problems of harmony. They arise from the perception of an unsolved discord and the instinct of an undiscovered agreement or unity. To rest content with an unsolved discord is possible for the practical and more animal part of man, but impossible for his fully awakened mind, and usually even his practical parts only escape from the general necessity either by shutting out the problem or by accepting a rough, utilitarian and unillumined compromise. For essentially, all Nature seeks a harmony, life and matter in their own sphere as much as mind in the arrangement of its perceptions. The greater the apparent disorder of the materials offered or the apparent disparateness, even to irreconcilable opposition of the elements that have to be utilised, the stronger is the spur, and it drives towards a more subtle and puissant order than can normally be the result of a less difficult endeavour.”

Dr. Dalal writes: “A purely animal existence, governed by the vital consciousness, represents, in Menninger’s terms, the stage of Striving, popularly described as the animal’s struggle for existence. Though human beings are endowed with mental consciousness and have therefore learned to some extent to cope with the problems of life, most human beings are still primarily ruled by the vital consciousness, and therefore lead a life largely characterised by striving and struggling, very similar to that of the animal. But, unlike the animal, the human being, as previously stated, is a discontented creature, for he knows in the recesses of his inmost being that he has the power to free himself from the bonds of animal existence and become master of his destiny. As the Mother remarks: ‘… the vast majority of men are like prisoners with all the doors and windows closed, so they suffocate, which is quite natural. But they have with them the key that opens the doors and windows….’ This book offers help for using the key.”

Sri Aurobindo and the Mother, Looking from Within, Introduction by Dr. Dalal, pp. xii-xiii