Transcending the Fear of the Unlimited Spiritual Consciousness

A relatively frequent occurrence for the spiritual aspirant is to reach the boundary wall of consciousness and get a glimpse or experience of the spiritual consciousness without limits. This experience, when it comes, may raise up tremendous fear in the individual and he reacts, almost automatically and spontaneously, drawing himself away from that unlimited field and back into his own comfortable ego-self. The reaction is one of the ego-consciousness that fears its dissolution. The individual is not yet ready to accept and receive the limitless spiritual consciousness and rebounds into the small, limited human existence.

A somewhat similar thing occurs when an individual has, in a conscious state, what is called an ‘out of body’ experience’. [n.b. as opposed to those that may be related to a near-death experience which may be involuntary and not under any kind of active conscious awareness or control.] The individual reports seeing a silver thread or line from his awareness back to the physical body. As he moves farther away, he can experience vast realms of space, visit other places, see other things, all without known limits. But the moment he worries about ‘what will happen if this thread snaps’ or ‘how far can i go without the thread snapping’, he is immediately plunged back into the limited human body and the experience ends.

The poet Kahlil Gibran expressed this feeling in his poem ‘Fear’: ‘It is said that before entering the sea a river trembles with fear. She looks back at the path she has traveled,
from the peaks of the mountains, the long winding road crossing forests and villages.And in front of her, she sees an ocean so vast, that to enter there seems nothing more than to disappear forever. But there is no other way. The river can not go back. Nobody can go back. To go back is impossible in existence. The river needs to take the risk
of entering the ocean because only then will fear disappear, because that’s where the river will know it’s not about disappearing into the ocean, but of becoming the ocean.‘

As long as the individual remains within the confines of the human ego-personality, and the individual mind-life-body complex, he is limited in the consciousness he identifies with. It is only when he can go beyond the boundary, overcome the fear of dissolution that is the offspring of the ego-consciousness, that he can be born into the spirit and live in that vast, untrammeled consciousness.

The Mother notes: “In fact, 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, and they do not use it…. Certainly there is a time when they don’t know they have the key, but long after they have come to know it, long after they have been told about it, they hesitate to use it and doubt whether it has the power to open the doors and windows or even that it is a good thing to open them! And even when they feel that ‘after all, it might be good’, there remains some fear: ‘What will happen when these doors and windows are opened?…’ and the are afraid. They are afraid of being lost in that light and freedom. They want to remain what they call ‘themselves’. They like their falsehood and their bondage. Something in them likes it and goes on clinging to it. They still have the impression that without their limits they would no longer exist.”

“That is why the journey is so long, that is why it is difficult. For if one truly consented to cease to exist, everything would become so easy, so swift, so luminous, so joyful — but perhaps not in the way men understand joy and ease. In truth, there are very few people who do not enjoy fighting. There are very few who could accept the absence of night, few can conceive of light except as the opposite of darkness: ‘Without shadows there would be no picture. Without struggle, there would be no victory. Without suffering there would be no joy.’ That is what they think, and so long as one thinks in this way, one is not yet born into the spirit.”

Sri Aurobindo and the Mother, Powers Within, Chapter XXII Spirit, pp. 165-166