Addressing the Tendency to Overlook One’s Defects

The vital nature in particular has a strong hold over the mentality. It uses this hold to find ways for the mind to justify various things that the vital desires. In many cases this occurs through a process of deflection and in others through a process of development of excuses and justifications.

This process takes place whether one is living and acting in the world, or attempting to develop a spiritual life through the practice of any particular discipline. Our focus here is obviously toward the implementation of a spiritual seeker of methodologies to systematically become awake to and then to find ways to overcome various actions that distract from the yogic process. This can even occur in the adoption of various yogic practices. For instances, there are certain yogic paths that try to overcome attachment through spiritualising and uplifting normal drives of the vital nature. Thus we see advertised practices of ‘tantric sex’ which, while there may be cases where such a practice actually suits a specific seeker and helps him achieve the result, in many cases we have seen, actually becomes a justification for indulging in sex, thereby effectively distracting the seeker from the process of transcending the desire-nature and shifting the focus to the divine standpoint.

Justifications can be developed for almost anything. Once a devotee was visiting a Vedanta center in the USA and was invited to join the monks there for dinner. After dinner, they served popcorn. Innocuous indulgence! But they went on a long explanation about the spiritual benefits of popco
and how it can help to lead to liberation in the vedantic tradition. Methinks they do protest too much, to paraphrase the poet!

If we take the standpoint that the spiritual seeker needs to shift his focus from the fulfillment of the desires and objectives of the exte
al world in favor of a focus on spiritual practice and realisation, and a perfection and transformation of the nature to become true instruments of that divine action in the world, we can quickly appreciate that all habits of the physical, vital and mental nature need to be reviewed, and either abandoned or modified to allow the refocusing and transformation effort to progress.

Sri Aurobindo writes: “But that [not recognising one’s defects] is a very common human weakness, although it ought not to exist in a sadhak whose progress depends largely on his recognising what has to be changed in him. Not that the recognition by itself is sufficient, but it is a necessary element. It is of course a kind of pride or vanity which considers this necessary for strength and standing. Not only will they not recognise it before others but they hide their defects from themselves or even if obliged to look at it with one eye look away from it with the other. Or they weave a veil of words and excuses and justifications trying to make it something other than it really is.”

“To recognise one’s weaknesses and false movements and draw back from them is the way towards liberation.”

Sri Aurobindo and the Mother, Looking from Within, Chapter 2, Looking at Oneself and Others, pp. 38-39