This essay topic gives me an opportunity to take a look at myself. I will try to describe how I see this process of growth and transformation through my subjective view.

The person I am today and the one I was in 2007 when I began to read Sri Aurobindo are, in many aspects, two different beings. Or I can say that what I am today is a rearranged person on its way to become a new person. During these two and a half years, several discoveries have made a major impact on me creating ripples through the whole being. For most of these major discoveries, it is most difficult to speak about their impact because they have actually resulted in fundamental re-understandings brought out from the inner being, and these are soaking in and spreading to the rest of the being, giving me a feeling of expansion or a wave of some realization in and around the physical body. Then there are the shifts in understanding of the world seen from the point of view of the principles Sri Aurobindo has presented. These new thoughts and ideas have changed my views on and my understanding of myself and the world. On one level, these understandings have been perceived and understood mentally, but I have also become aware that they have also had a strong impact on my entire being in ways I have not registered mentally. This has been and is an ongoing process where the daily readings and studies have brought and continue to bring new aspects, thoughts and ideas. The understanding often comes in waves. It starts with an understanding that questions my views and thoughts or gives me new information. Then in situations where I think or speak, the thoughts and ideas come out in expressions that are fit and clear for the context. Many times it is amazing to see how these new thoughts and ideas naturally find their place in my mind and actions. It is also very clear to me that Sri Aurobindo’s thoughts and ideas make me able to easily understand the different contexts I am entering. It is as if the knowledge brings a possibility, so to say, to decode the world we live in, to make it understandable for us in this gradually unfolding manifestation of the highest aim of life on earth.

After having had the first overview of Sri Aurobindo’ s thoughts and ideas, I understood that all the knowledge I had acquired throughout my life up to that point was as if thrown in a heap on the ‘floor in an empty room.’ This picture was for me very true. I had no structures to sort the knowledge from my life and studies. I had no fundamental truth to build my world on, except the shaky dissatisfactory Christian and scientific world-view. The first thing I found by studying
Sri Aurobindo was that this storage room of all my knowledge finally got shelves on which I could put the books. This was a process that seemed to happen according to where the knowledge was found to belong. This picture is of course a little too simple, but it provides for me a way of seeing the process of rearrangement that is going on in my being with the help of Sri Aurobindo. It points to the fact that Sri Aurobindo provides a structure to place the knowledge according to what is recognized to be the right position and relation in my being. The “library” is in a way my being’s structure and projection from the transcendental to the physical. The order in these projected lines or strings are being ‘stretched, cleaned and tuned’ for the divine play in the physical world by Sri Aurobindo.

The heap of varied content is picked up and first put in a position where I can take a closer look. The blocks contain a mix of things that I in my ignorance have put together. Some of the content is kept, others are rearranged or discarded. Thus I finalize my “new chapters,” which are again taken apart into paragraphs and then again in words and it seems that this process will not end before it is only separate letters or sounds that can re-arrange themselves in full divine freedom in Sri Aurobindo’s structure of the world. The content is floating around in a dynamic flow according to where its impact is needed. The dynamic truth of the world seems to me to be this formation of possibilities within a true structure, and according to a Divine will arranged in interaction with all levels of the creation in an unending play.

This process of arranging and rearranging the truth into higher and higher truths are interrupted by the formations that do not want to change or that have been so long a part of my being that their truths have become obstacles on the way. These truths have found themselves on the lower levels of consciousness where falsehood has its domain. They are as if segmented in layers and need a lot of effort to be prepared for the transformation. They protest against any modification to be taken out of their context in which they feel they fit so well, and they feel they have the right to be and are justified by ages to be playing their own game. They are all the formations that create the disturbance in mind, vital and psychical parts of the being and life. It is when the major fundamental discoveries happen that these are shaken in their formation and have to become more flexible. It is when the new structures become established and clear that these are ready to find their new place. Seen in this way they are helpers in the establishment of the true structures. They hold on to the old truths until the new ones have become convincingly established and will be able to hold and support their newly viewed content.

To summarize, as I continue to study Sri Aurobindo’s thought, I find that these studies are having an impact on all the parts of my being and that there is considerable growth in all parts. There are softenings and openings, there are changes and transformations more or less tangible. The most visible changes, for me, are this structure that is built in my mind and the flow I experience in my life which I attribute to my inner guide to whom I have surrendered. This part within—this inner guide—arranges things in a way that many times is surprising to see how things come together when it seems to be most difficult. I think that this is the dynamism of life that is experienced and which can be there when the mind has let go of its supremacy and has given parts of itself to the higher way of working. Behind this is felt the inner being’s delight in all things as a constant smoothening fog in all the activities, thoughts and feelings. A part in me is witnessing this flow and knows that my outer being’s role is to surrender to the higher law.