In
Difficulty
Page-2
The
lower vital in most human beings is full of grave defects
and of movements that respond to hostile forces. A constant
psychic opening, a persistent rejection of these influences,
a separation of oneself from all hostile suggestions and
the inflow of the calm, light, peace, purity of the Mother’s
power would eventually free the system from the siege.
What
is needed is to be quiet and more and more quiet, to look
on these influences as something not yourself which has
intruded, to separate yourself from it and deny it and to
abide in a quiet confidence in the Divine Power. If your
psychic being asks for the Divine and your mind is sincere
and calls for liberation from the lower nature and from
all hostile forces and if you can call the Mother’s
power into your heart and rely upon it more than on your
own strength, this siege will in the end be driven away
from you and strength and peace take its place.
-
Sri Aurobindo
The
lower nature is ignorant and undivine, not in itself hostile
but shut to the Light and Truth. The hostile forces are
antidivine, not merely undivine; they make use of the lower
nature, pervert it, fill it with distorted movements and
by that means influence man and even try to enter and possess
or at least entirely control him.
Free
yourself from all exaggerated self-depreciation and the
habit of getting depressed by the sense of sin, difficulty
or failure. These feelings do not really help, on the contrary,
they are an immense obstacle and hamper the progress. They
belong to the religious, not to the Yogic mentality. The
Yogin should look on all the defects of the nature as movements
of the lower Prakriti common to all and reject them calmly,
firmly and persistently with full confidence in the Divine
Power—without weakness or depression or negligence
and without excitement, impatience or violence.
-
Sri Aurobindo
The
rule in Yoga is not to let the depression depress you, to
stand back from it, observe its cause and remove the cause;
for the cause is always in oneself, perhaps a vital defect
somewhere, a wrong movement indulged or a petty desire causing
a recoil, sometimes by its satisfaction, sometimes by its
disappointment. In Yoga a desire satisfied, a false movement
given its head produces very often a worse recoil than disappointed
desire.
What
is needed for you is to live more deeply within, less in the
outer vital and mental part which is exposed to these touches.
The inmost psychic being is not oppressed by them; it stands
in its own closeness to the Divine and sees the small surface
movements as surface things foreign to the true Being.
-
Sri Aurobindo
In
your dealings with your difficulties and the wrong movements
that assail you, you are probably making the mistake of
identifying yourself with them too much and regarding them
as part of your own nature. You should rather draw back
from them, detach and dissociate yourself from them, regard
them as movements of the universal lower imperfect and impure
Nature, forces that enter into you and try to make you their
instrument for their self-expression. By so detaching and
dissociating yourself it will be more possible for you to
discover and to live more and more in a part of yourself,
your inner or your psychic being which is not attacked or
troubled by these movements, finds them foreign to itself
and automatically refuses assent to them and feels itself
always turned to or in contact with the Divine Forces and
the higher planes of consciousness. Find that part of your
being and live in it; to be able to do so is the true foundation
of the Yoga.
By
so standing back it will be easier also for you to find a
quiet poise in yourself, behind the surface struggle, from
which you can more effectively call in the help to deliver
you. The Divine presence, calm, peace, purity, force, light,
joy, wideness are above waiting to descend in you. Find this
quietude behind and your mind also will become quieter and
through the quiet mind you can call down the descent first
of the purity and peace and then of the Divine Force. If you
can feel this peace and purity descending into you, you can
then call it down again and again till it begins to settle;
you will feel too the force working in you to change the movements
and transform the consciousness. In this working you will
be aware of the presence and power of the Mother. Once that
is done, all the rest will be a question of time and of the
progressive evolution in you of your true and divine nature.
-
Sri Aurobindo
|
