The Best Way to Help Others and Help the World

When we want to help alleviate the suffering in the world, or help solve the general concerns, or the more specific individual needs and wants, we come up with an endless number of ideas about ‘how to help’. From an outward perspective these may be highly valuable and useful activities. Spiritual and religious organisations, in particular, tend to focus on feeding the hungry, healing and caring for the sick, providing shelter. These things help to mitigate some of the worst dislocations and imbalances in the world and how society functions. Others may be moved to work on the larger issues of climate change, pollution, fresh water supply, food to sustain large numbers of people residing in the world, as well as looking for ways to adapt the work and living environments to be more supportive of people and their needs and interests. Still others may be moved to tackle technological questions to help solve the issues we are all facing. Some may work on how to bring peace and understanding in the world, and others may work on bringing beauty and harmony through art, music, dance, writing, and entertainment media of various sorts.

People obviously need to follow their passion and vision and carry out these and other worthwhile projects in the interests of supporting all of humanity. Yet none of these things actually solves the underlying issues; rather, they act as a sort of bandage over the wounds that we create through our interactions with each other and our environment. The real solutions only come when we move beyond simply ameliorating harm already being caused, to resolving the root causes.

It is at this level that the Mother counsels that the true help is a change of consciousness. This is not carried out through dogmatic expressions, argument, mental ideas or any form of outward control, but through inward growth and change that works on the energetic levels of being.

Many seekers have experienced the ‘atmosphere’ of someone who is immersed in the spiritual consciousness. Legends across many cultures speak of souls who touched others simply by their presence, the energetic vibration they created in their surroundings. On an individual level we can appreciate the power of the spiritual consciousness. The Mother indicates that for the spiritual seeker, the development of the spiritual consciousness, and the natural effect it has on others, is actually the best approach to aiding human development, as it creates a ‘contagion’ effect and helps to transform life at the level of root causes.

We have heard about the 100th Monkey phenomenon. We have had the concept of the noosphere explained as a reason why the same invention tends to pop up in widely diverse places around the same time. We are clear that vibrations of consciousness are universal, traverse the entire planet and can impact people from a distance, particularly as they move away from purely physical and vital vibrations to the more subtle, powerful levels of mind, and eventually the spiritual consciousness. Thus, it is clearly reasonable to accept that as individuals begin to vibrate under the force of the spiritual consciousness, they are helping to raise up the vibratory level and energetic responsiveness of all of humanity. It is this type of change, similar to what the mental force did to the physical and vital planes, that we can expect from the full advent and manifestation of the spiritual consciousness as we mature and begin to experience that level with more completeness and intensity.

The Mother notes: “It is these people the mental being does not understand. So long as one is in the mental consciousness, even the highest, and sees the spiritual life from outside, one judges with one’s mental faculties, with the habit of seeking, erring, correcting, progressing, and seeking once again; and one thinks that those who are in the spiritual life suffer from the same incapacity, but that is a very gross mistake!”

“When the reversal of the being has taken place, all that is finished. One no longer seeks, one sees. One no longer deduces, one knows. One no longer gropes, one walks straight to the goal. And when one has gone farther — only a little farther — one knows, feels, lives the supreme truth that the Supreme Truth alone acts, the Supreme Lord alone wills, knows and does through human beings. How could there be any possibility of error there? What He does, He does because He wills to do it.”

“For our mistaken vision these are perhaps incomprehensible actions, but they have a meaning and an aim and lead where they ought to lead.”

(Silence)

“If one sincerely wants to help others and the world, the best thing one can do is to be oneself what one wants others to be — not only as an example, but because one becomes a centre of radiating power which, by the very fact that it exists, compels the rest of the world to transform itself.”

Sri Aurobindo and the Mother, Powers Within, Chapter XXII Spirit, pp. 168-169