The Phenomenon of the ‘Evil Persona’

We are ingrained with the notion that we own both the positive and negative qualities we can identify within ourselves. We work to enhance those we consider positive, and we struggle to overcome those that we view as negative. Through the practice of separating out the witness consciousness from the active outer nature, we gain a certain amount of objectivity about these qualities but nevertheless, to the extent we accept them as our own we provide them a basis for their continued attachment to ourselves.

We do not often take into account the broader issues involved as the universal planes of force intersect with and permeate life in the world we inhabit. The action of the powers and beings of the mental sphere, or the vital sphere are generally unrecognised and thus, their influence and action goes mostly undetected as we simply experience the impacts and treat them as arising within ourselves independently. 

Sri Aurobindo highlights the issue of vital beings and forces that have their own focus, purpose, agenda and powers of action, which can impact us, and, to the extent that our efforts undermine their objectives, can impede those efforts. These forces are naturally attracted to any vibrational pattern that aligns with their own pattern, so efforts by a seeker to address certain vital forces automatically bring those individuals into the purview of the vital beings who are nourished by the expression of those forces. The intensity of the opposition means that the seeker must be prepared to face these energetic forces and reject them entirely in order to eventually succeed.

The Mother notes: ”You haven’t seen in the Bulletin that letter of Sri Aurobindo’s: the ‘Evil Persona’? It is in the Bulletin. The thing is very well explained there.”

“[What you say about the ‘Evil Persona’ interests me greatly as it answers to my consistent experience that a person greatly endowed for the work has, always or almost always, — perhaps one ought not to make a too rigid universal rule about these things — a being attached to him, sometimes appearing like a part of him, which is just the contradiction of the thing he centrally represents in the work to be done. Or, if it is not there at first, not bound to his personality, a force of this kind enters into his environment as soon as he begins his movement to realise. Its business seems to be to oppose, to create stumblings and wrong conditions, in a word, to set before him the whole problem of the work he has started to do. It would seem as if the problem could not, in the occult economy of things, be solved otherwise than by the predestined instrument making the difficulty his own. That would explain many things that seem very disconcerting on the surface.]“ Sri Aurobindo, Letters on Yoga

Sri Aurobindo and the Mother, Our Many Selves: Practical Yogic Psychology, Chapter 6, Some Answers and Explanations, pg. 168