Establishing the Psychic Being as the Central Organizing Principle and Overcoming the Dominion of the Vital Nature and the External Being

As long as we identify ourselves with our exte
al personality, the body-life-mind complex we inhabit and project into the world, we are subject to the responses, reactions and motivations that they express, based on the developments of the entire past evolutionary history of consciousness on the planet and specifically closely associated with the socialization we receive through family, friends, school, and the society at large. We internalize these things to such a degree that we believe we ARE these things! We remain locked within the framework of this personality and its relationship to its society and the world at large, and we thus do not even recognise that there can be, and indeed is, another way to relate. In particular the vital nature thrives in this environment as it tries to fulfill its desires and its power, and long history of control, ensure that it will manipulate the mind to believe and support its assertions, and thereby justify the old ways, the old habits, the old aims and methods of fulfillment of the vital’s drives.

In order to transition away from this state of affairs, the spiritual aspirant needs to be able to, first of all, separate himself from the exte
al nature of the body-life-mind so that he can actually see the process at work and observe the vital impulses and how they act upon the mind; and then, be prepared to act upon what he can now observe to ensure that a change takes place and that the focus is shifted away from the vital nature to the psychic standpoint.

Sri Aurobindo writes: “The one condition of getting rid of things [inner obstacles] is an absolute central sincerity in all the parts of the being, and that means an absolute insistence on the Truth and nothing but the Truth. There will then be a readiness for unsparing self-criticism and vigilant openness to the light, an uneasiness when falsehood comes in, which will finally purify the whole being.”

“The defects mentioned are more or less common in various degrees in almost every sadhak, though there are some who are not touched by them. They can be got rid of, if the requisite sincerity is there. But if they occupy the central parts of the being and vitiate the attitude, then the sadhak will give a constant open or covert support to them, his mind will always be ready to give disguises and justifications and try to elude the searchlight of the self-critical faculty and protests of the psychic being. That means a failure in the yoga at least for this existence.”

Sri Aurobindo and the Mother, Looking from Within, Chapter 5, Attitudes on the Path, pg. 120