The Risks and Difficulties of Eliminating Lower Drives Through Purposeful Indulgence, Part 2

Dealing with deeply embedded drives of the subconscient and the lower vital through raising them up and indulging in them not only contains risks that one may fall into a deeper pattern of habitual response, but also can be a pretext for the vital enjoyment of the action with a veneer to disguise it to the mind for what it really is. The vital is extremely able in its attempt to convince the mind that indulgence is acceptable for one reason or another. It is particularly difficult for the mind to distinguish and resist when the lower drives are raised up before there is a clear, consistent action of the higher mental and overmental intelligence to be able to both distinguish and resist the pressure of the rising force. This is one of the primary concerns about the awakening of the kundalini energy in an unprepared individual as these drives in the lower chakras get stirred up and there is no real way to defeat them without the higher action very much in control. This same danger attends the use of psychoanalysis when it dredges around the subconscious being, brings forth dark and uninformed forces without the conscious being in a position to understand and manage them effectively. The force unleashed, its native power simply overwhelms the individual leaving him either confused or caught up in the action.

Sri Aurobindo notes: “The other motive for anubhava is of a more general applicability; for in order to reject anything from the being one has first to become conscious of it, to have the clear inner experience of its action and to discover its actual place in the workings of the nature. One can then work upon it to eliminate it, if it is an entirely wrong movement, or to transform it if it is only the degradation of a higher and true movement. It is this or something like it that is attempted crudely and improperly with a rudimentary and insufficient knowledge in the system of psycho-analysis. The process of raising up the lower movements into the full light of consciousness in order to know and deal with them is inevitable; for there can be no complete change without it. But it can truly succeed only when a higher light and force are sufficiently at work to overcome, sooner or later, the force of the tendency that is held up for change. Many, under the pretext of anubhava, not only raise up the adverse movement, but support it with their consent instead of rejecting it, find justifications for continuing or repeating it and so go on playing with it, indulging its return, eternising it; afterwards when they want to get rid of it, it has got such a hold that they find themselves helpless in its clutch and only a terrible struggle or an intervention of divine grace can liberate them. Some do this out of a vital twist or perversity, others out of sheer ignorance; but in yoga, as in life, ignorance is not accepted by Nature as a justifying excuse. This danger is there in all improper dealings with the ignorant parts of the nature; but none is more ignorant, more perilous, more unreasoning and obstinate in recurrence than the lower vital subconscious and its movements. To raise it up prematurely or improperly for anubhava is to risk suffusing the conscious parts also with its dark and dirty stuff and thus poisoning the whole vital and even the mental nature. Always therefore one should begin by a positive, not a negative experience, by bringing down something of the divine nature, calm, light, equanimity, purity, divine strength into the parts of the conscious being that have to be changed; only when that has been sufficiently done and there is a firm positive basis, is it safe to raise up the concealed subconscious adverse elements in order to destroy and eliminate them by the strength of the divine calm, light, force and knowledge.”

Sri Aurobindo, Integral Yoga: Sri Aurobindo’s Teaching and Method of Practice, Chapter 9, Transformation of the Nature, Transformation of the Subconscient, pp. 262-267