Absorbed In the World of Matter :

To,


All Members,


It is quite normal and usual for human beings to live and act in a manner that shows virtually total absorption in the world of matter and the life as presented to our normal human awareness. This stems from the standpoint of the Divine which involves itself in the manifested world, the Kshara Purusha, and a near total one-pointed concentration of the consciousness in that focus. When one is in that state, there seems to be only the outer reality and any reference to the Spirit, God, or other forms of consciousness is treated as an illusion! We see in fact today, many noted scientists, thinkers, philosophers and caring individuals who try to explain away consciousness as purely a phenomenon of Matter with nothing else beyond.

The Gita of course does not accept this viewpoint and through the development of the three eternal standpoints, and various techniques for separation of the identification with the outer forms and forces, it has provided us ways to enter into and respond to the world from the other standpoints. When one can once adjust the standpoint outside of the fixation on the material world, one begins to realize that the forms and forces themselves are somewhat illusory, since they are dependent on the spiritual consciousness for their very existence.

Sri Aurobindo describes this situation: “This ignorance is possible, is even imposed, because the Godhead within is hidden by the veil of his own power. His greater reality is lost to our view by the completeness with which he has identified himself in a partial appearance with his creations and images and absorbed the created mind in the deceptive workings of his own Nature. And it is possible also because the real, the eternal, the spiritual Nature which is the secret of things in themselves is not manifest in their outward phenomena. The Nature which we see when we look outwards, the Nature which acts in our mind and body and senses is a lower Force, a derivation, a Magician who creates figures of the Spirit but hides the Spirit in its figures, conceals the truth and makes men look upon masks, a Force which is only capable of a sum of secondary and depressed values, not of the full power and glory and ecstasy and sweetness of the manifestation of the Divine. This Nature in us is a Maya of the ego, a tangle of the dualities, a web of ignorance and the three Gunas. And so long as the soul of man lives in the surface fact of mind and life and body and not in his self and spirit, he cannot see God and himself and the world as they really are, cannot overcome this Maya, but must do what he can with its terms and figures.”

Sri Aurobindo