Inner Peace Is the Foundation and Basis for Spiritual Growth

When the spiritual seeker begins to recognise all of the difficulties and obstacles in his own external being, and understands the need to reduce and remove these obstacles if there is to be any permanent and major progress, he may begin by struggling with the desires, the movements that arise, the thoughts that harass his mind. There is no end to these difficulties, so if he becomes fixated on them, he can distract himself from the transformational work of shifting his focus to the spiritual realms and the energy that they make available. At some point, he comes to recognise that this is a thankless effort that does not bring any finality to the process. It is something like the fifth labour of Hercules, when he was required to clean out the Augean stables.

The story goes that King Augeus had a stable that had housed 3000 oxen for a period of 30 years, and it had never been cleaned out. (Reminds us of our vital nature having picked up many bad habitual practices over the course of millennia.) He set Hercules the task of cleaning out this stable. Of course, if he started at one end, and worked at it systematically, by the time he completed one round, the 30,000 oxen would have recreated the mess and he would have to start over again. (We see here the issue of trying to clean up the vital nature through detailed attention and action as it never actually gets clean). Hercules had another approach to what was deemed to be an impossible task. He redirected the flow of a couple of rivers through the stables, and quickly cleaned out the entire stables!

This is a reminder to the spiritual seeker that it is the higher spiritual force that has the true purifying power and that reliance on our own mental-vital-physical being and its limited capabilities does not work; rather, if we turn our focus to the spiritual force, and become receptive to its action, it alone has the power to cleanse and purify the vital nature.

Whereas the focus on the physical, vital and mental obstacles can cause considerable disruption and consternation, the opening to the spiritual force brings with it the inner peace which becomes the true foundation of the yogic practice.

Sri Aurobindo writes: “Aspire, concentrate in the right spirit and, whatever the difficulties, you are sure to attain the aim you have put before you.”

“It is in the peace behind… that you must learn to live and feel it to be yourself. You must regard the rest as not your real self, but only a flux of changing or recurring movements on the surface which are sure to go as the true self emerges.”

“Peace is the true remedy; distraction by hard work is only a temporary relief — although a certain amount of work is necessary for the proper balance of the different parts of the being.”

“If you get peace, then to clean the vital becomes easy. If you simply clean and clean and do nothing else, you go very slowly — for the vital gets dirty again and has to be cleaned a hundred times. The peace is something that is clean in itself, so to get it is a positive way of securing your object. To look for dirt only and clean is the negative way.”

Sri Aurobindo and the Mother, Looking from Within, Chapter 5, Attitudes on the Path, pg. 116