Through Spiritualized Mind Beyond the Surface View, We Overcome Our Divided Nature & Fulfill our Human

Aspiration Sri Aurobindo says that we can reconcile the contradictions we experience through Nature's slow and difficult method -- i.e. between what we are and what we can become; between matter and spirit, pleasure and pain, positive and negative, etc. -- by overcoming our divided nature. How then do we do that? He says that when we rise beyond the surface, sense oriented aspect of mind to higher levels of mentality -- including rational mind and better still to spiritualized mind of vision and intuition (culminating in the plane of Supermind) -- we develop a truer view of life, reconciling things that appear in opposition, perceiving them as true complements. Or to put it another way, this movement in consciousness from the surface to the depths enables us to shed our divided nature, perceive the oneness and unity of all things, enabling us to become whole and thereby fulfill our human aspiration. [When we withdraw from the surface visual, auditory, and other sense inputs, and instead move to a deeper consciousness, culminating in soul, we rise to spiritualized mind, where we see the necessity of both parts of any dual pair, of every opposite or contradictory element as necessary for the forward movement and progress of life.] Fulfilling the Business Aspiration The Business Aspiration for total, unending success, fulfillment, and enjoyment can be thought of as the equivalent to The Human Aspiration for God, light, love, and immortality that Sri Aurobindo describes in the opening chapter of The Life Divine. He tells us there that we have not fulfilled the Human Aspiration because of our divided nature -- essentially a lack of harmony in the parts of our being and an essential Ignorance born of creation. We can overcome this by overcoming the contradictions of who we are and create a new, higher harmony. Likewise, we can deduce that if a business or organization fails or otherwise has serious problems, it is due to a similar disharmony, in its particular parts, structures, and view. And like the limited human, the firm can overcome its division by finding its own higher harmony, reminding us again of Sri Aurobindos famous dictum that all problems in life are problems of harmony. Where is the lack of harmony in business? In The Vital Corporation Garry Jacobs and Robert Macfarlane say that there are five engines of growth -- technology/product/service, organization, people, market, and capital. When any is out of balance or lacking relative to another, it creates significant disharmony. E.g. if sales push is high, but employees producing them are stressed, then there will be disharmony between those two parts. Wherever we overcome that, we create harmony and therefore fulfill the Business Aspiration (paralleling the Human Aspiration) with its infinitely positive propensities. There are many ways to look at the cross-sections of business and determine the disharmonies that cause businesses to stress or fail or not sustain themselves. One other approach, described in Garry Jacobs and Fred Harmons earlier book, The Vital Difference, presents the company as having an inner soul, (i.e. a Psychic Center), consisting of its deepest purpose, motives, and values, and then several concentric rings emanating from it, signifying different aspects of the organizations, culminating in an outer circle that are the most identifiable physical activities of the firm. If there is disharmony amongst these rings, there will be commensurate problems, preventing the Business Aspiration from being fulfilled.

We can also look at the cosmic determinates that emanate from Satchitananda -- including Knowledge, Silence, Harmony, Power, Creativity, Goodness, Beauty, Love, Timelessness, Infinity, and Delight -- and see across or among these which are missing or are in contradiction in the organization. E.g. there may be good intention towards people in the company (Goodness and Harmony), but there is little psychological strength amongst leadership to weather the storm of competitors or recession. In other words, there is lack of internal psychological Power. Thus, the contradiction presents itself and must be resolved at that level. One of the central themes of the chapter on the Human Aspiration from The Life Divine is that Natures method of progress is through contradiction, which can only be resolved through a Higher Harmony. In these and other ways we can determine why the Business Aspiration is unfulfilled in any firm or organization. Sri Aurobindo says it is due to our Divided Nature -- i.e. the contradictions in the company, which are indicated through these various views of the organization. The solution then is Harmony between the divided parts. Then the Business Aspiration (mirroring its Human Aspiration counterpart) can be fulfilled -- as there will be deep and abiding enjoyment, fulfillment, affection, creativity, success, and wealth in the firm, that goes on indefinitely and infinitely, which parallels the Immortality sought in its Human Aspiration equivalent that Sri Aurobindo addresses in The Life Divine. ---------(Response to above essay) A reader raised a question that in essence asks whether we can have good things (only) happen without the bad, avoiding Nature's way of progress through contradictions (i.e. both positive and negative, pleasure and pain, etc.). I answered as follows: Life progresses through good and bad things, positive and negative. If you relate a negative that comes your way to a corresponding lack of consciousness on your part, and then change it, causing you to grow and evoke positive life response, then the negative certainly serves as an instrument of positive change. (If you also see how that negative circumstance and people are necessary in the flow of life to enable positive progress, you will perceive something even greater: the Marvel of existence.) As for only doing good things (only) in the first place, it depends on what you mean by good. Good in the human sense is to serve our intentions, our desires, our needs, our ego, which means that this good can be positive or negative. Good in the spiritual sense however, i.e. the higher Good, is to do what is spiritually right such as practicing selfgivingness, nonreaction, higher organization, adoption of higher attitudes and values within the context of what you aspire for (from something wholesome you want to achieve, all the way up to aspiring for the divine to increasingly enter into your life). Thus, we can see that the normal, human good has the shadow of negatives, while the higher Good is self-existent, and produces no opposition and negative. We can learn from both. From the former, we can learn to understand what generated the negative in us and change it. From the latter we can embark on a spiritual path of never ending growth, evolution, and transformation, enabling us to realize within us spiritual qualities of peace, wisdom, light, power, creativity, love, bliss, infinity, and timelessness. I.e. the fulfillment of the deepest Human Aspiration.