The following excerpt is an entry from The Mother's Question and Answers, 1955, in which she discusses 'All work' as a 'school of experience' and 'the whole life [as] a field of experience' via which we learn how to unify the inner and the outer experience. Our civilization is build upon the Mind's experience that the inner self (Spirit) is opposite ... opposed to and separate from the external circumstances of our life (Matter). Some people live exclusively on the surface, not acknowledging or experiencing any underlying spirit, and some recoil from the surface towards the spirit, not acknowledging or experiencing the presence of spirit in the surface circumstances and dynamic movements of material existence.

The Mother acknowledges that a quest towards the Spirit or the Immobile, Silent Self upon which creation rests, may be progress compared to a purely materialistic perspective, but it is in no way the goal or highest perspective of our consciousness. The goal is a Unified-Consciousness ‒ simultaneously one and many, at rest and in motion, point and periphery, simple and complex. In other words the goal is not a recoil or escape from material existence which culminates in the realization of formlessness or nothingness (or even 'heaven'); but is a Unity-Consciousness, a Supramental Consciousness which transforms the totality of individual and collective circumstances into a Life Divine, via the realization of the eternal connection between the stable Core and the dynamic Periphery. The image of the circle, with its point and circumference (the Sun's Symbol) is the best way to begin to fathom this realization ... one is neither lost on the periphery nor recoiled towards the point. One IS the Totality.

Continue reading at: http://circumsolatious.blogspot.com/2013/01/connecting-inner-and-ou...