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

0:00 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.

0:41 Fiora Window begins the Life Divine with the following quote. 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. Ancient dawns of human knowledge have left us their witness to this constant aspiration.

1:28 Today you 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 organized entirety by a revolutionary individual effort or an evolutionary general progression.

2:16 To know, possess and be the divine being in an animal and egoistic consciousness. To convert our twilight or obscure physical mentality into the plenary supermental illumination. To build peace and the 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 realize 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 organization of consciousness for the limit of its possibilities, the direct contradiction of the unrealized ideals with the realized fact is a final argument against their validity.

3:26 But if we take a more deliberate view of the world's workings, that direct opposition appears rather as a 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.

4:07 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 utilized, the stronger is the spur, and it drives towards a more subtle and poison order than can normally be the result of a less difficult endeavor.

4:55 End Quote. Doctor de Lal writes quote. A purely animal existence governed by the vital consciousness represents, in Meninger's terms, the stage of striving popularly described as the animals 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 characterized by striving and struggling very similar to that of the animal.

5:36 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, quote, 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, End Quote. This book offers help for using the key, End Quote.

6:23 Reference Sri Aurobindo and the Mother, Looking from Within, Introduction by Doctor Delal, pages 12 to 13.