The Cycles and Causes of Recurring Difficulties in Relation to Spiritual Development and Progress

It is a limitation of our normal mental mode of understanding that we do not tend to take into account the impact of time and the cyclical nature of development. We expect things to move in a straight line. We expect progress to be continuous and in a single direction. When we overcome a particular issue or obstacle, we believe it is in our past, over and done with. When it recurs at a later stage of the spiritual journey, we become conce
ed or confused about whether we have made any progress at all, since we are apparently confronted with the very same issue we already ‘dealt with’ and put behind us.

There are several, intertwined, issues involved in the recurrence of difficulties already faced and overcome. First, there is the ‘law of the minimum’. The human being is a complex amalgam of a number of different parts and powers of being, which have been brought together and found a rough balance for working to create an individual lifetime and life-experience. Change does not happen in all parts of the being at once; rather, a modest change in one part allows the progress to open up in other parts of the being to some degree. What was ‘locked in’ to a way of doing things now has the opportunity to make further adjustments. Thus a change at the mental level can lead to progress on the vital or physical levels. Facing and overcoming a specific difficulty thus is not necessarily addressing it either for all parts of the being, or for all time, as in some cases, an absolute minimum of progress needed to be made in one part so others could begin to adjust. One then returns to the original issue with a new foundation and basis that has developed as a result of the consequential development brought about by the first ‘minimum’ change.

A second issue follows from the first. We may eliminate a particular issue from one part of the being, but not from the others. Thus, the difficulties maintain a foothold somewhere in the being. If removed from any mental sanction, they can still provide a vital impulse, or a physical craving, or fall even deeper into the subconscious realms, there to remain encapsulated until some circumstance triggers their reappearance.

This brings us to a third issue, which is the cycles of development. We do not grow and progress in a straight line. We make some progress, we face a setback or get redirected to some degree, we open up to new forces and energies, and then we thereby gain new insight and new powers of action to address the recurrent difficulty from a new place, higher in the cycle of our evolutionary development, but with the new abilities provided by the new insights and powers of action we have gained in the interim.

We come then to the larger question of the unity of all existence, of all humanity, such that as long as a particular force or activity remains alive and active anywhere, it has the potential to invade and impact any individual, particularly if that individual is not expecting it, is off his guard, or is in a state of relative non-observance, such as during a sleep state.

We have documented circumstances of individuals who were deeply committed to a humanist agenda who happened to pass by a Nazi rally in 1930’s Germany. The individual thought he could simply observe what was happening, but found that he too, despite his abhorrence at the Nazi agenda, found himself shouting and participating in the hate-filled environment. Which of us is truly so free of any human responsiveness that we can withstand powerful vital forces working in others around us and impacting our vital envelope or aura?

As a result, progress is necessarily something that occurs in stages and cycles and we need to overcome the mental limitation that fails to recognise that there is no ‘final’ resolution until the force itself has been either eliminated or transformed in its entirety from all of Nature through evolutionary development and the influx of a new power of consciousness that can harmonise and overcome the limits of the former evolutionary stages.

Sri Aurobindo notes: “It is quite normal for difficulties to come back… and it is not a proof that no progress has been made. The recurrence (after one has thought one has conquered) is not unaccountable. I have explained in my writings what happens. When a habitual movement long embedded in the nature is cast out, it takes refuge in some less enlightened part of the nature, and when cast out of the rest of the nature, it takes refuge in the subconscient and from there surges up when you least expect it or comes up in dreams or sudden inconscient movements or it goes out and remains in wait in the environmental being through which the universal Nature works and attacks from there as a force from outside trying to recover its kingdom by a suggestion or repetition of old movements. One has to stand fast till the power of return fades away. These returns or attacks must be regarded not as parts of oneself, but as invasions — and rejected without allowing any depression or discouragement. If the mind does not sanction them, if the vital refuses to welcome them, if the physical remains steady and refusees to obey the physical urge, then the recurrence of the thought, the vital impulse the physical feeling will begin to lose its last holds and finally they ill be too feeble to cause any trouble.”

Sri Aurobindo and the Mother, Looking from Within, Chapter 5, Attitudes on the Path, pp. 156-157