The Complex Nature of Our Being Impacts Our Ability to Change and Transform Our Lives

Those who identify with their mental being tend to believe that if they think in a certain way, that they have succeeded in embodying that. They will take the thought for the accomplishment without necessarily recognising that their physical actions, their vital energies and even aspects of their thought mind continue with things their minds have rejected. This occurs because people tend not to recognise that they are actually not a uniform being with one cohesive and coherent line of development, but rather, that they are an amalgam of a number of different beings, fused together into what we call ourselves, our personality, our being.

It becomes even more interesting when we begin to recognise that not everything that we respond to when a signal reaches our brain is even truly our human constitution. Scientists nowadays advise us that in our intestines we have a thriving colony of intestinal flora, micro-organisms, and that they are very much responsible for a good portion of our digestive action. Now they have discovered that this bacterial colony sends signals to the brain when it wants food, and that at least part of our experience of hunger is due to the cravings of our symbiotic companions in our digestive system. Whose hunger is it if it is the bacteria calling for food and signaling our brain to get something to eat?

We also receive impulses from forces outside our bodies. We do not observe these forces entering and stirring up vibrations within us, so we tend to identify with those vibrations and treat them as our own. With close observation, we can begin to distinguish the movement of these universal forces and their impact on our body-life-mind complex.

When we finally awaken to the realisation that holding a particular thought is only one step in the process, and that we need to carry out that thought such that it harmonizes thought, word and deed, in a coherent way. Until that happens, all of these elements, whether they are residents within our being, whether they are part of our vital or physical being, with their habits, instincts and trained responses, or whether they are exte
al forces which we allow to enter and manifest within us, will drive our actions, regardless of our mental ideas and aspirations.

The Mother writes: “Evidently there is one difficulty; in your conscious being something does not want the difficulty, wishes sincerely to overcome it, but there are numberless movements in other parts of your consciousness of which you are not conscious. You say, ‘I want to be cured of that’; unfortunately it is not sufficient to say ‘I want’, there are other parts of the consciousness which hide themselves so that you may not be busy with them, and when your attention is turned away these parts try to assert themselves. That is why I say and shall always repeat, Be perfectly sincere; do not try to deceive yourself, do not say, ‘I have done all that I could’. If you do not succeed, it means that you do not do all that you can. For, if you truly do ‘all’ that you can, you will surely succeed. If you have any defect which you want to get rid of and which still persists, and you say, ‘I have done all that I could’, you may be sure that you have not done all that you should have. If you had, you would have triumphed, for the difficulties that come to you are exactly in proportion to your strength — nothing can happen to you which does not belong to your consciousness, all that belongs to your consciousness you are able to master. Even the things and suggestions that come from outside can touch you only in proportion to the consent of your consciousness, and you are made to be the master of your consciousness. If you say, ‘I have done all that I could and in spite of everything the thing continues, so I give up’, you may be already sure that you have not done what you could. When an error persists, ‘in spite of everything’ it means that something hidden in your being springs up suddenly like a Jack-in-the-box and takes the helm of your life. Hence, there is only one thing to do, it is to go hunting for all the little dark corners which lie hidden in you and, if you put just a tiny spark of goodwill on this darkness, it will yield, will vanish, and what appeared to you impossible will become not only possible, practicable, but it will have been done. You can in this way in one minute get rid of a difficulty which would have harassed you for years. I absolutely assure you of it. That depends only on one thing: that you truly, sincerely, want to get rid of it. And it is the same for everything, from physical illnesses up to the highest mental difficulties. One part of the consciousness says, ‘I don’t want it’, but behind there hides a heap of things which say nothing, do not show themselves, and which just want that things continue as they are — generally out of ignorance; they do not believe that it is necessary to be cured, they believe that everything is for the best in the best of worlds.”

Sri Aurobindo and the Mother, Looking from Within, Chapter 4, Ordeals and Difficulties, pp.88-89