The Creative Process Blog

When personality does not have enough ‘power-to-be’, sickness occurs, causing people to become fiercely competitive. Manipulating oneself, and others, for ‘power-to-be’ results in collective egoism, which invariably diminishes personality,
as Sri Aurobindo says,

“. . . clashing mental ideas, urges of individual and collective physical want and need, vital claims and desires, impulses of an ignorant life-push, hungers and calls for life satisfaction of individuals, classes, nations,
a rich fungus of political and social and economic nostrums and notions,
a hustling medley of slogans and panaceas for which men are ready to oppress and be oppressed, to kill and be killed, to impose them somehow or other by the immense and too formidable means placed at his disposal, in the belief that this is his way out to something ideal.”

Conversely, when personality finds inner power, beyond the ego mental-constructs, personality ‘comes alive’ with the flow of creative power. Power is based upon ‘intuitive grasp’, without agency, as Consciousness-Force,
as Sri Aurobindo says,

“But because the burden which is being laid on mankind is too great for the present littleness of the human personality and its petty mind and small life-instincts, because it cannot operate the needed change, because it is using this new apparatus and organization to serve the old infraspiritual and infrarational life-self of humanity, the destiny of the race seems to be heading dangerously, as if impatiently and in spite of itself, under the drive of the vital ego seized by colossal forces which are on the same scale as the huge mechanical organization of life and scientific knowledge which it has evolved, a scale too large for its reason and will to handle, into a prolonged confusion and perilous crisis and darkness of violent shifting incertitude.”

Experiencing power ‘immediately’ is essential for humanity to realize perfection, since perfection demands freedom and responsibility. Power that is ‘mediated’ results in ‘perfectionism’ that is externally coerced.

When personality does not have enough ‘power-to-be’, sickness occurs, causing people to become fiercely competitive. Manipulating oneself, and others, for ‘power-to-be’ results in collective egoism, which invariably diminishes personality,
as Sri Aurobindo says,

“. . . clashing mental ideas, urges of individual and collective physical want and need, vital claims and desires, impulses of an ignorant life-push, hungers and calls for life satisfaction of individuals, classes, nations,
a rich fungus of political and social and economic nostrums and notions,
a hustling medley of slogans and panaceas for which men are ready to oppress and be oppressed, to kill and be killed, to impose them somehow or other by the immense and too formidable means placed at his disposal, in the belief that this is his way out to something ideal.”

Conversely, when personality finds inner power, beyond the ego mental-constructs, personality ‘comes alive’ with the flow of creative power. Power is based upon ‘intuitive grasp’, without agency, as Consciousness-Force,
as Sri Aurobindo says,

“But because the burden which is being laid on mankind is too great for the present littleness of the human personality and its petty mind and small life-instincts, because it cannot operate the needed change, because it is using this new apparatus and organization to serve the old infraspiritual and infrarational life-self of humanity, the destiny of the race seems to be heading dangerously, as if impatiently and in spite of itself, under the drive of the vital ego seized by colossal forces which are on the same scale as the huge mechanical organization of life and scientific knowledge which it has evolved, a scale too large for its reason and will to handle, into a prolonged confusion and perilous crisis and darkness of violent shifting incertitude.”

Experiencing power ‘immediately’ is essential for humanity to realize perfection, since perfection demands freedom and responsibility. Power that is ‘mediated’ results in ‘perfectionism’ that is externally coerced.