Gaining the Support of the Vital Being for the Sadhana Through the Joy of Creative Activity

One of the issues that every spiritual seeker eventually faces is what to do about the vital nature. The vital being is an essential element of life on earth. Normally however it is distracted with its needs and desires, the seeking for pleasure and enjoyment, the avoidance of pain and suffering. The difficulty of dealing with the drives of the vital being have led many spiritual seekers to attempt to suppress it, or overpower it through an action of the mental will. Thus we have paths that focus on asceticism or extreme austerities to try to force the vital to respond in a way that supports the spiritual seeking and demand of the practitioner.

Yet there are enormous problems with this approach unless the goal is to abandon life and achieve a concentrated state independent of an active life in the world. For the spiritual seeker in the integral Yoga, however, this approach does not work, as the objective is not to drop the body and the life entirely, but to eventually transform life into a life divine.

This approach requires what may be seen as “untying the knot” of the vital difficulties rather than “cutting the knot”. The vital must eventually agree and eventually enthusiastically support the transformation, and thus, it must also find an appropriate form of satisfaction that both meets its needs, and helps to carry out the transformative effort. Sri Aurobindo has identified this as an approach that supports the joy of creative effort.

Sri Aurobindo notes: “I have always told you that you ought not to stop your poetry and similar activities. It is a mistake to do so out of asceticism or with the idea of tapasya. One can stop these things when they drop of themselves, because one is full of experience and so interested in one’s inner life that one has no energy to spare for the rest. Even then, there is no rule for giving up; for there is no reason why poetry etc. should not be part of sadhana. The love of applause, the desire for fame, the ego-reaction have to be given up, but that can be done without giving up the activity itself. Your vital needs some activity — most vitals do — and to deprive it of its outlet, an outlet that can be helpful and not harmful, makes it sulking, indifferent and desponding or else inclined to revolt at any moment and throw up the sponge. Without the assent of the vital it is difficult to do sadhana — it non-co-operates, or it watches with a grim, even if silent dissatisfaction ready to express at any moment doubt and denial; or it makes a furious effort and then falls back saying: ‘I have got nothing.’ The mind by itself cannot do much, it must have support from the vital and for taht the vital must be in a cheerful and acquiescent state. It has the joy of creation and there is nothing spiritually wrong in creative action. Why deny your vital this joy of outflow?”

Sri Aurobindo, Integral Yoga: Sri Aurobindo’s Teaching and Method of Practice, Chapter 12, Other Aspects of Sri Aurobindo’s Teaching and Method of Practice, Art, Poetry, Music, Literature, pp. 356-361