Dealing with Mental Resistance to Attempts to Silence the Mind

It is quite natural for an individual, particularly a seeker attempting to make progress in the yogic process, to internalize the difficulties and blame them on his own weakness, incapacity, or lack of will power. The reality, however, is that this is a continuation of the egocentric viewpoint and does not represent the complete facts of the situation.

Since thought is universal, the resistance arises in universal nature and attaches itself to the individual through affinity and receptivity to the vibration that is taking place. Whenever an individual focuses on something, positively or negatively, he creates an ‘affinity’ to those vibrations and thus, the opportunity for the force, in this instance, one of resistance, to enter the being. There is a type of filtering process that occurs based on the inner focus and the general vibrational receptivity. As an individual develops new focus and interests, old preoccupations tend to gradually be reduced or eliminated. We see this with children as they grow out of the things that kept them occupied at each stage of their development.

For an active seeker, the separation of the consciousness, so as to be able to observe these activities in the mind, becomes a great aid in not getting caught up in the ego-struggles and in being able to understand the process as it gradually develops.

The Mother observes: “Now, if it so happens that you have decided to progress and if you enter the path of yoga, then a new factor intervenes. As soon as you want to progress, you immediately meet the resistance of everything that does not want to progress both in you and around you. And this resistance naturally expresses itself in all the thoughts that correspond to it.”

“Suppose that you want to make a progress regarding attachment to food, for example; well, almost constantly there will come to you thoughts particularly interested in food, about what should be taken, what should not be taken, how it should be taken, how it should not be taken; and these ideas will come to you, they will seem quite natural to you. And the more you say within yourself, ‘Oh! how I would like to be free from all that, what a hindrance to my progress are all these preoccupations’, the more will they come, quietly, until the progress is truly made within and you have risen to a level of consciousness where you can see all these things from above and put them in their place — which is not a very big place in the universe. And so on, for all things. Therefore, your occupations and affinities are going to put you almost contradictorily into contact not only with ideas having an affinity and relation with your way of being, but with the opposite. And if you don’t take care from the beginning to keep an attitude of disce
ment, you will be turned into a mental battlefield.”

Sri Aurobindo and The Mother, Living Within: The Yoga Approach to Psychological Health and Growth, Disturbances of Mind, Unruly and Perturbing Thoughts, pp. 35-43