= What Prevents Expansion and Widening? =
== Submental, the Subconscient and Inconscient’s Hold on Us ==
In the lower grades of the ascension the new assumption, the integration into a higher principle of consciousness, remains incomplete: the mind cannot wholly mentalise life and matter; there are considerable parts of the life being and the body which remain in the realm of the submental and the subconscient or inconscient. This is one serious obstacle to the mind's endeavour towards the perfection of the nature; for the continued share of the submental, the subconscient and inconscient in the government of the activities, by bringing in another law than that of the mental being, enables the conscious vital and the physical consciousness also to reject the law laid upon them by the mind and to follow their own impulses and instincts in defiance of the mental reason and the rational will of the developed intelligence. This makes it difficult for the mind to go beyond itself, to exceed its own level and spiritualise the nature; for what it cannot even make fully conscious, cannot securely mentalise and rationalise, it cannot spiritualise, since spiritualisation is a greater and more difficult integration.
<ref>Sri Aurobindo. (2005). The ascent towards the supermind. In The life divine II.
http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/22/the-ascent-towards-supermind#p16</ref>
But, usually, those who are attached to the past want to keep the past by itself, and the others who want to go forward want to reject everything and keep only what they have found. And so both of them make a common mistake... that is, of limiting themselves and making their consciousness narrow instead of widening it.
(The Mother, 26 October 1955)
<ref>The Mother. (2003). 26 October 1955. In Questions and answers (1955).
http://incarnateword.in/cwm/07/26-october-1955#p39</ref>
If mankind only caught a glimpse of what infinite enjoyments, what perfect forces, what luminous reaches of spontaneous knowledge, what wide calms of our being lie waiting for us in the tracts which our animal evolution has not yet conquered, they would leave all and never rest till they had gained these treasures. But the way is narrow, the doors are hard to force, and fear, distrust and scepticism are there, sentinels of Nature, to forbid the turning away of our feet from her ordinary pastures.