The Psychic Being Brings Cheerful Focus to the Spiritual Sadhana

In his novel Martin Chuzzlewit, Charles Dickens exposes us to a character who is perpetually cheerful, Mark Tapley. We meet him in a comfortable situation working at an inn, with a warm relationship with the proprietor of the inn, with whom he is in love (and who is in love with him). He recognises that this cheerful attitude may be conditioned by his favourable circumstances and posits that he will only know the steadfastness and character of himself and his cheerful responses to life if he can maintain that attitude in difficult circumstances. He purposely chooses to give up the comfortable situation and place himsefl in life circumstances that will challenge his ability to be cheerful. He passes the tests he set for himelf and proves that he is able to face everything that life confronts him with, while maintaining his basic and characteristic positive attitude. Poverty, life and death circumstances, being cheated by con men, and facing all kinds of adversity did not shake him.

What Charles Dickens illuminates here is an important lesson, not only for life in the exte
al world, but also for the way we confront obstacles, setbacks, difficulties, delays and diversions that can come up during the spiritual practice.

Sri Aurobindo and the Mother remind us that the basic element of cheerfulness comes from the opening of the psychic being and its shifting the attention away from the exte
al ego-personality to the spiritual purpose and focus. It is the vital ego that suffers under the blows of the world. The psychic being can appreciate and understand that when there are issues or obstacles, they are part of the process of the transformation process and need to be taken in stride. The psychic naturally turns its focus towards the Divine and thus, attracts the support and energy that comes from the Divine, just as the sunflower turns its face toward the sun.

Sri Aurobindo observes: “Cheerfulness is the salt of sadhana. It is a thousand times better than gloominess.”

“It [cheerfulness] puts you in the right condition for the psychic to work and without knowing it you grow in just the right perceptions and right feelings for the spiritual attitude.”

The Mother adds: “All depression and gloom is created by the hostile forces who are never so pleased as when throwing on you a melancholy mood…. Therefore, face your troubles joyously, oppose with invariable cheerfulness the obstacles that best the road to transformation. The best means of routing the enemy is to laugh in his face! You may grapple and tussle for days and he may still show an undiminished vigour; but just once laugh at him and lo! he takes to his heels. A laugh of self-confidence and of faith in the Divine is the most shattering strength possible — it disrupts the enemy’s front, spreads havoc in his ranks and carries you triumphantly onwards.”

“The converted vital feels… a joy in the process of realisation. All the difficulties implied in that process it accepts with gusto, it never feels happier than when the Truth is shown it and the play of falsehood in its lower nature laid bare. It does not do the Yoga as if carrying a burden on its back but as if it were a very pleasurable occupation. It is willing to endure the utmost with a smile if it is a condition of the transformation. Neither complaining nor grumbling, it endures happily because it is for the sake of the Divine that it does so. It has the unshakable conviction that the victory will be won.”

Sri Aurobindo and the Mother, Looking from Within, Chapter 5, Attitudes on the Path, pp. 141-142