Integral Yoga Method for Attaining Mastery Over the Force of Desire in the Lower Vital Nature

Humanity develops habits of response that tend to become ingrained in almost all approaches to any particular topic. This is found to be especially true when it comes to the question of religious dedication and spiritual aspiration. The default response to religious or spiritual devotion has historically been to give up, abandon, the focus on life in the material world. Whether it is the renunciate or the monk, or life in the desert, the cave, the monastery, cloister, ashram or abbey, humanity has created a fixed and habitual way of addressing the issue, to such a degree that this approach is rarely, if ever, challenged.

This habit is based on the mind-set that treats the physical being as the basis and the development of mental, religious and spiritual impulses as a development that seeks to transcend the physical body. This has led to many experiments such as extreme fasting, vows of silence, ascetic bareness, vows of poverty and other ways of making a clean break from the physical, material life to one of spiritual focus. People have experienced clear benefits from these approaches, which has led to their becoming embedded in the spiritual and religious development in the first place.

Sri Aurobindo’s approach represents a different, more nuanced approach to the issues, inasmuch as he sets the objective, not as the abandonment of life, but the upliftment and transformation of life. The need for focus on the spiritual effort remains, but all of these longstanding methods have to be looked at with a new understanding and from a perspective based on transformation rather than escape from the life of the world.

A devotee, living at Sri Aurobindo Ashram some years ago, recounted an experiment he made for a period of time. He determined to adopt a vow of silence to gain some control over the force of speech and the energy that was dispersed in idle talk on a day to day basis. He adopted carrying a notebook and pen with him to respond to people. The discipline helped keep him focused on the internal process. Yet he felt that he needed to adapt the vow of silence to allow him to carry out the tasks he was given as part of the ashram community. He thus adopted the process of speaking to the extent it was directly related to the work he was assigned, and then only the absolutely necessary speech, while refraining from all ‘social’ speech. He carried on this experiment for a period of some months and learned a great deal about the impulsion to speak and the habitual patterns of interaction. He also gained an insight about the use of the vow of silence itself and how it would need to be modified for an individual who did not want to cut the use of speech entirely.

Similar review could lead to a change from extreme fasting to a careful understanding of the actual needs of the body and life energy and a tailoring of the food intake to meet those needs without indulgence in the desires of the palate, the social habits of taking meals, the cravings of the lower vital nature or going to the extreme of fixating so much on this process of understanding that it becomes a distraction of its own.

Instead of avoidance of money and its power, the devotee could accept money from the standpoint of the trustee who does not assert ownership over the money. Money could flow to carry out activities that enhance the well-being of people and the balance of the environment, as well as bringing beauty, harmony and enrichment to life, without any sense of self-aggrandisement or individual ego-satisfaction.

All of these modified approaches imply a more conscious and subtle approach to both accomplish the objective and avoid creation of an excuse for indulgence. The practitioner needs to be inwardly awake and totally dedicated to the spiritual quest to align himself with the divine Will rather than the promptings of the ego-personality.

Sri Aurobindo writes: “If you want to do Yoga, you must take more and more in all matters, small or great, the Yogic attitude. In our path that attitude is not one of forceful suppression, but of detachment and equality with regard to the objects of desire. Forceful suppression (fasting comes under the head) stands on the same level as free indulgence; in both cases, the desire remains: in the one it is fed by indulgence; in the other it lies latent and exasperated by suppression. It is only when one stands back, separates oneself from the lower vital, refusing to regard its desires and clamours as one’s own, and cultivates an entire equality and equanimity in the consciousness with respect to them that the lower vital itself becomes gradually purified and itself also calm and equal. Each wave of desire as it comes must be observed, as quietly and with as much unmoved detachment as you would observe something going on outside you, and must be allowed to pass, reject from the consciousness, and the true movement, the true consciousness steadily put in its place.”

Sri Aurobindo, Bases of Yoga, Chapter 4, Desire — Food — Sex, pg. 65