Increasing Awareness, Detachment and Mastery Are the Requirements for the Practitioner of the Integral Yoga

We have something of a conflict in the way we tend to view the development of consciousness. On the one side, we generally try to minimize the distractions and reactions to sensations, impulses, feelings, thoughts from outside while we attend to our meditation or deep spiritual concentration. The stories abound of sages who were so immersed in their internal meditation that they did not react to anything external, in some cases having anthills grow up around their bodies! While awareness at the level of the spiritual consciousness increased, awareness of the body, vital energies and the mind were put in abeyance. If followed to the logical conclusion, we wind up with the ascetic call to abandon the body and the external life to follow the way of the spirit.

On the other side, we have those who believe that the spiritual consciousness is unreal and we should focus on attending more perfectly and completely to the needs of the external life. These individuals may go to great lengths to improve their ability to experience and respond to sensations, and they undertake, in many instances very intensive training regimens to enhance their capacities, to increase their coordination of the incoming sense perception and the responsiveness of the mind and the rest of the being.

Practitioners of the integral yoga have an entirely different object in view. They neither seek to abandon the external life, nor become immersed in it to the exclusion of their spiritual growth and development. Thus they cannot simply walk away from the sensations, impulses, feelings, suggestions, emotions and thoughts that come with involvement in the external life. They are actually asked to become more aware, more conscious, more sensitive to the forces and energies at work that impinge upon them and provoke them to respond.

The issue then, is not to become less aware, less sensitive, less conscious, but to find a way to gain a greater awareness while simultaneously stepping back to avoid being pulled in and immersed in these impressions and sensations without due ability to filter them, accepting those that are helpful, rejecting those that are not, modifying where possible for anything that can be made useful.

Sri Aurobindo writes: “This is due to an acute consciousness and sensitiveness of the physical being, especially the vital-physical.”

“It is good for the physical to be more and more conscious, but it should not be over-powered by these ordinary human reactions of which it becomes aware or badly affected or upset by them. A strong equality and mastery and detachment must come, in the nerves and body as in the mind, which will enable the physical to know and contact these things without feeling any disturbance; it should know and be conscious and reject and throw away the pressure of the movements in the atmosphere, not merely feel them and suffer.”

Sri Aurobindo, Bases of Yoga, Chapter 1, Calm — Peace — Equality, pg. 12