Unflagging Perseverance and Persistence Is Required for the Practice of the Integral Yoga

Athletes undergo extensive training routines, logging many thousands of hours with, in many cases, tough physical conditioning and practice, in order to achieve their goals for physical development and to be able to participate in a competitive sporting event. Many who are not athletes undertake training routines to modify their physical strength or endurance. Actors in many cases have to take serious programs to prepare for a particularly demanding role that requires physical toning, strengthening or conditioining of their bodies. In each case, the individual does not achieve the desired result ove
ight, but has to undergo in some cases daily training that can go on for weeks, months or years. To maintain the condtioning requires ongoing regular supportive activity.

Similarly, great artists have to hone their craft, just as do great scientists, mathematicians or others who develop powers of the vital being or the mind.

Some of the individuals who start on these paths give up due to the strenuous nature of what they are called to do, as in some cases, the training and focus consumes their lives and leaves them little freedom to explore other aspects of life. If they find it too difficult and give up, they simply move on into other areas of life and leave the dreams behind.

For the spiritual seeker it is not different. Some people have the notion that taking up spirituality means some kind of escape from the rigours and circumstances that they have to face. Yet anyone who has tried to achieve a quiet mind in meditation, or who has attempted to change some element of his physical, vital or mental being, soon finds out that it is not as easy as was imagined. For those who took up a spiritual life out of a sense of defeat and to avoid facing the difficulties of the exte
al life, there are constant setbacks and some of these individuals, finding it too difficult, give up and go back to some less trying outer life activity. Others recognise that, while they may have sought an escape, there is no escape and they simply find a way to accept the trials and continue to push fowrard.

When we observe the hundreds of millions of years that life on earth has had to develop fixed habits and instinctive behaviour, it becomes clear why it may take some time and constant, persevering efforts, to effectuate a change! In fact, the individual setbacks are simply steps along the way as the seeker works out the necessary means to uplift some aspect of human nature. This involves a focus as intense, if not more intense, than anything that an athlete or some other individual striving to succeed in the exte
al world, has to face, as one is then up against millions of years of habitual patterns that have to be deconstructed and modified.

The Mother writes: “… if you are not able to face difficulties without getting discouraged and without giving up, because it is too difficult; and if you are incapable… well, of receiving blows and yet continuing, of ‘pocketing’ them, as they say — when you receive blows as a result of your defects, of putting then in your pocket and continuing to go forward without flagging — you don’t go very far; at the first turning where you lose sight of your little habitual life, you fall into despair and give up the game.”

“The most… how shall I put it? the most material form of this [quality of endurance] is perseverance. Unless you are resolved to begin the same thing over again a thousand times if need be… You know, people come to me in despair, ‘But I thought it was done and now I must begin again!’ And if they are told, ‘But that’s nothing, you will probably have to begin again a hundred times, two hundred times, a thousand times; you take on step forward and think you are secure, but there will always be something to bring back the same difficulty a little farther on. You think you have solved the problem, you must solve it yet once again; it will turn up again looking just a little different, but it will be the same problem’, and if you are not determined that: ‘Even if it comes back a million times, I shall do it a million times, but I shall go through with it’, well, you won’t be able to do the yoga. This is absolutely indispensable.”

“People have a beautiful experience and say, ‘Ah, now this is it!…’ And then it settles down, diminishes, gets veiled, and suddenly something quite unexpected, absolutely commonplace and apparently completely uninteresting comes before you and blocks your way. And then you say, ‘Ah! what’s the good of having made this progress if it’s going to start all over again? Why should I do it? I made an effort, I succeeded, achieved something, and not it’s as if I had done nothing! It’s indeed hopeless.’ For you have no endurance.”

“If one has endurance, one says, ‘It’s all right. Good, I shall begin again as often as necessary; a thousand times, ten thousand times, a hundred thousand times if necessary, I shall begin again — but I shall go to the end and nothing will have the power to stop me on the way.”

Sri Aurobindo and the Mother, Looking from Within, Chapter 5, Attitudes on the Path, pp. 138-139