The Hidden Springs of Life, pp. 160-162

Opening Remarks
We live in a small and narrow zone of consciousness. We are unaware of the occult commerce of life that goes on unnoticed by our surface mind. We act and think it as our own actions but what we do not know are the forces that push us from behind.

Cosmic agencies
Inscrutable work the cosmic agencies.

The powers that work in creation are hidden from our sight. It is the action of these cosmic forces that sustains the processes of life.

A fringe we see
Only the fringe of a wide surge we see;
Our instruments have not that greater light,
Our will tunes not with the eternal Will,
Our heart’s sight is too blind and passionate.

Our sight, feeling, will and knowledge are limited because of this giant circle of ignorance that surrounds us here. We are not tuned to the universal Will and are blinded by our ego-self and the play of passions and desires. Therefore we see and yet we see not, we know and yet we know not.

The Inconscient store
Impotent to share in Nature’s mystic tact,
Inapt to feel the pulse and core of things,
Our reason cannot sound life’s mighty sea
And only counts its waves and scans its foam;
It knows not whence these motions touch and pass,
It sees not whither sweeps the hurrying flood:
Only it strives to canalise its powers
And hopes to turn its course to human ends:
But all its means come from the Inconscient’s store.

Reason, the sole instrument given to us is itself largely under the Inconscient influence and cannot discern or know the deeper truths and the complex play of forces that move us. Its range is clamped down to the surface play and the immediate sequence of events. It is not an instrument of knowledge but a means for organising what is ‘known’. Knowledge cannot come so long as we are tied to the surfaces of life or have the sight to penetrate the ocean depths of creation and touch its mystic core.

Huge world-energies
Unseen here act dim huge world-energies
And only trickles and currents are our share.

The forces that act upon our lives are too complex and subtle for our grasp. What we notice is only a small fraction of the huge world-machinery and the forces that move it.

A small corner of infinity
Our mind lives far off from the authentic Light
Catching at little fragments of the Truth
In a small corner of infinity,
Our lives are inlets of an ocean’s force.

Our mind has not the light by which Truth can be seen. What we can perceive are small fragments and little streams of world-energy that enter our lives from the world-ocean. We remain closed in a small ill-lit corner of creation and hope to fathom all its secrets while staying there.

Sealed origins
Our conscious movements have sealed origins
But with those shadowy seats no converse hold;
No understanding binds our comrade parts;
Our acts emerge from a crypt our minds ignore.

The springs of our actions lie hidden below in the subconscient regions to which our waking awareness has little access.

Mystery’s shop
Our deepest depths are ignorant of themselves;
Even our body is a mystery shop;
As our earth’s roots lurk screened below our earth,
So lie unseen our roots of mind and life.

Our very body is a mystery driven by forces unknown to us and yet with a rare and minute perfection. We can see the shoots that come above the surface but not the roots of our actions that lie below submerged in the subconscious regions.

Behind the veil
Our springs are kept close hid beneath, within;
Our souls are moved by powers behind the wall.

We are pushed by agencies that move within and around us in our subliminal and subconscious parts.

Subterranean reaches
In the subterranean reaches of the spirit
A puissance acts and recks not what it means;
Using unthinking monitors and scribes,
It is the cause of what we think and feel.

There is subconscious part domain that dips below our outer material existence. Its forces are powerful and siege our thoughts and feelings pushing us to act in an irrational impulsive manner.

Subliminal secrecies
The troglodytes of the subconscious Mind,
Ill-trained slow stammering interpreters
Only of their small task’s routine aware
And busy with the record in our cells,
Concealed in the subliminal secrecies
Mid an obscure occult machinery,
Capture the mystic Morse whose measured lilt
Transmits the messages of the cosmic Force.

The energies of the subconscient Mind enter our conscious waking surface life from behind, through the subliminal parts. They are like notations that are taken up by the cells which then begin to dance to their tune and respond to their suggestions. That is how forces if illness, suggestions of fear and death etc enter our cells like poison and make us sick and throw us towards the abyss of despair.

Inner ear
A whisper falls into life’s inner ear
And echoes from the dun subconscient caves,
Speech leaps, thought quivers, the heart vibrates, the will
Answers and tissue and nerve obey the call.

These suggestions enter through the doors of an inner mind of which we are mostly unaware. It is only when they take the form of thought and speech that we become aware, ignorantly taking them as our own thought and feelings.

Secret commerce
Our lives translate these subtle intimacies;
All is the commerce of a secret Power.

This is the secret commerce that takes place all the time behind our waking consciousness using our body and mind as mere instruments of a cosmic play.

Closing Remarks
Sri Aurobindo is revealing to us the boundaries of our ignorance, the vast domains of consciousness and forces and energies that act upon us without our knowledge.