The Difficulty and Time Required for the Transformation of the Nature

We make ‘new year’s resolutions’ with the idea that we will start the new year with a fresh dedication to undertaking some kind of change to our lives. This may be a mental change, such as a willingness to listen and try to truly understand what others say and think rather than jumping in our minds to our own ideas and engaging in arguments to convince others. It may be a vital change where we determine to not become angry, or jealous or envious of others in various situations. It may be a physical change, such as deciding to carry out regular exercise, or moderate one’s eating, or change one’s diet altogether.

The human will-power is generally insufficient to overcome the embedded habits, traints, instinctive and learned behaviours. Receptivity to a higher force, and shifting the focus and attention to a wider and higher pursuit is perhaps the only permanent method available; yet each of us starts with our human instruments and we usually begin by trying to assert our minds and will power to the process.

What we find is that the more highly evolved parts of the being are more easily modified than those that partake of a more solid and material framework. The three Gunas of Nature tend to have their strongest action in alignment with the part of the being that most easily adapts itself to their action. Thus, Sattwa is generally more ‘at home’ in the mind, Rajas in the vital nature and Tamas in the physical. This corresponds to the level of flexibility found in each of these parts of the being. A change in the physical parts of the being takes longer and involves more difficulty due to the predominance of the tamasic element and the embedded habits or grooves built into that part through millennia of evolution.

Sri Aurobindo writes: “Each part of the nature wants to go on with its old movements and refuses, so far as it can, to admit a radical change and progress, because that would subject it to something higher than itself and deprive it of its sovereignty in its own field, its separate empire. It is this that makes transformation so long and difficult a process.”

“Mind gets dulled because at its lower basis is the physical mind with its principle of tamas or inertia — for in matter inertia is the fundamental principle. A constant or long continuity of higher experiences produces in this part of mind a sense of exhaustion or reaction of unease or dullness. Trance or samadhi is a way of escape — the body is made quiet, the physical mind is in a state of torpor, the inner consciousness is left free to go on with its experiences. The disadvantage is that trance becomes indispensable and the problem of the waking consciousness is not solved; it remains imperfect.”

Sri Aurobindo, Bases of Yoga, Chapter 3, In Difficulty, pp. 39-40