The True Condition of Spiritual Progress

We frequently hear from people who say that they cannot focus on their spiritual practice as they don’t have a quiet space in which to meditate, or they live in a crowded, noisy city, or they are overwhelmed with all their duties relating to education, career, family, etc. They focus their attention on all of the exte
al obstacles and use that as an excuse to avoid the focus on their inner spiritual life. “If only i could find the time and a quiet place, i would meditate every day.” We hear this refrain repeated in one form or another regularly.

If only we could create the ‘ideal’ exte
al circumstances!

Those who take up a spiritual practice in all earnestness, soon discover that there are no ‘perfect’ surroundings nor any ‘perfect’ times to focus on their spiritual life. They therefore have to create the space internally needed to remain connected regardless of what they have in front of them in their exte
al lives.

It is interesting to note that Sri Krishna chose to provide the spiritual teaching encompassed with the Bhagavad Gita to Arjuna while they were on the battlefield and awaiting a cataclysmic clash in the great civil war described in the Mahabharata.

Anecdotes abound about individuals who complained that people were talking outside the meditation hall while they were trying to meditate. Their meditation failure is blamed on what other people were doing. The teacher’s response in one case was essentially, why are you letting the talking of others interfere with your meditation. They did not complain that your meditation was disturbing their discussion!

People try to go on retreats to achieve the perfect circumstances for spiritual progress. In some instances, of course, a period of time away from the daily routine can be very helpful. But they invariably find out that, first, they carry their issues with them into the retreat, and second, they have not actually succeeded in resolving these issues when they return to their normal duties.

Sri Aurobindo observes: “The inner spiritual progress does not depend on outer conditions so much as on the way we react to them from within — that has always been the ultimate verdict of spiritual experience. It is why we insist on taking the right attitude and persisting in it, on an inner state not dependent on outer circumstances, a state of equality and calm, if it cannot be at once of inner happiness, on going more and more within and looking from within outwards instead of living in the surface mind which is always at the mercy of the shocks and blows of life. It is only from that inner state that one can be stronger than life and its disturbing forces and hope to conquer.”

“To remain quiet within, firm in the will to go through, refusing to be disturbed or discouraged by difficulties or fluctuations, that is one of the first things to be learned in the Path. To do otherwise is to encourage the instability of consciousness, the difficulty of keeping experience of which you complain. It is only if you keep quiet and steady within that the lines of experience can go on with some steadiness — though they are never without periods of interruption and fluctuation; but these, if properly treated, can then become periods of assimilation and exhaustion of difficulty rather than denials of sadhana.”

“A spiritual atmosphere is more important than outer conditions; if one can get that and also create one’s own spiritual air to breathe in and live in it, that is the true condition of progress.”

Sri Aurobindo, Bases of Yoga, Chapter 1, Calm — Peace — Equality, pg. 14