Unifying the Entire Being Around the Aspiration for the Divine

A spiritual seeker identifies with his aspiration and the focus and actions that come about as a result of that aspiration. It may be acts of prayer, acts of giving, acts of consecration, acts of meditation, or dedicated works. During the moments that he is engaged in these acts, he feels like the spiritual purpose of his life is being carried out.

Yet, when he turns to the other times of his life, the times when devotion and consecration are not at the very forefront, and he is asked to carry out the needs of living in the world, of responding to the opportunities, pressures, concerns and temptations of the external life, he often finds that he is carried away by desires, he experiences greed, or jealousy or anger, or lust or any number of other feelings that reside in his untransformed, and not yet transformed physical, vital or mental nature.

There are tales of yogis who spend years in silent meditation in a cave or forest retreat, who come into the world at some point. They believe they have achieved liberation, and then they see an object of desire and give in to that force. There are tales of yogic practitioners who are enticed at some point by money, wealth, fame or sex. The verdict is that they are outright hypocrites, but that may not in fact be the actual case. Somewhere within them, there is a true aspiration, a true consecration, but they have not done the work of identifying, modifying and unifying their entire nature around that aspiration, so when the circumstances arise, the seeds of desire sprout and grow.

The Mother writes: “… your being is full of innumerable tendencies at war with one another — almost different personalities, we may say. When one of them gives itself to the Divine, the others come up and refuse their allegience. ‘We have not given ourselves,’ they cry, and start clamouring for their independence and expression. Then you bid them be quiet and show them the Truth. Patiently you have to go round your whole being, exploring each nook and corner, facing all those anarchic elements in you which are waiting for their psychological moment to come up. And it is only when you have made the entire round of your mental, vital and physical nature, persuaded everything to give itself to the Divine and thus achieved an absolute unified consecration that you put an end to your difficulties. Then indeed yours is a glorious walk towards transformation, for you no longer go from darkness to knowledge but from knowledge to knowledge, l ight to light, happiness to happiness….”

Sri Aurobindo and the Mother, Our Many Selves: Practical Yogic Psychology, Chapter 1, Our Manifold Being, pg. 6