Vital Impatience and a Hurried Effort Are Obstacles to the Transformation of the Human Instrument

The vital ego is impatient. It wants to keep pressing on regardless of the impact on the body or the mind, or even its own native energy. It wants to get somewhere and begrudges the journey and the time and the waypoints along the path. It believes that haste will achieve the goal sooner, while in fact, it usually sets the achievement further away, due to the inevitable breakdowns, and the very energy that is circulating, which does not permit the Divine Force to act in its own way and its own time to carry out the complex, detailed and enormous task of transformation of human nature.

The human ego believes it can understand and judge the process and the steps along the way, and thereby undertake to manage how things will proceed. Yet it does not have even the remotest sense of everything that needs to be changed, or the order in which the change needs to occur to move things steadily onward without breakdowns or diversions, or the specific areas of human nature that any aspirant is called upon to work out at any point in time as a representative of the larger pool of the human species.

Sri Aurobindo notes: “There are always pauses of preparation and assimilation between two movements. You must not regard these with fretfulness or impatience as if they were untoward gaps in the sadhana. Besides, the Force rises up lifting part of the nature on a higher level and then comes down to a lower layer to raise it; this motion of ascent and descent is oftent extremely trying because the mind partial to an ascent in a straight line and the vital eager for rapid fulfilment cannot understand or follow the intricate movement and are apt to be distressed by it or resent it. But the transformation of the whole nature is not an easy thing to accomplish and the Force that does it knows better than our mental ignorance or our vital impatience.”

Sri Aurobindo, Bases of Yoga, Chapter 3, In Difficulty, pg. 49