These positions—the spiritual and the “materialist” (if you can call it that) positions—which consider themselves exclusive (exclusive and unique, and so each one denies the other’s value in the name of Truth) are inadequate, not only because neither one will accept the other, but because even accepting and uniting them both won’t solve the problem. Something else is needed, a third position that isn’t the result of these two but something still to be discovered, which will probably open the door to total Knowledge.
In the Life Divine, Sri Aurobindo said that these two positions can be fully reconciled only in the Supermind. And he says that for that reconciliation, we first have to acknowledge the Omnipresent Reality as BOTH Being and Becoming. Once the supramental manifests, Matter and Spirit will be reconciled. Apologies, if my understanding around this is flawed but that is how I understood the opening chapters of TLD.
If we so believe that true reconciliation is found in the Supermind, what then is this “third position” of unification that Mother is talking about?
The position of the materialist is that matter alone is real and all other experiences are imaginary or unreal.
The position of the typical mystic is that the Spirit alone is real and Matter and material world is an illusion.
The third position is the supramental position that regards both material and spiritual as two poles of One Reality, the Reality Omnipresent. The Spirit is primary and Matter is the condition for its manifestation. Practically it means a top-down view of Reality as in the image of the Aswattha tree and the Kena Upanishad. To first find the Supreme Reality and then understand how It has become all this, to observe the different lines along which the One Infinite Consciousness has descended and become this many-faceted, diverse multiverse is the secret, the Superscience and the integral synthetic spirituality of the future. Not to discard one for the other but to integrate them in a harmonious synthesis is the way forward for Science as well as Spirituality.
Affectionately,
Alok Da
