Overcoming the Power of External Circumstances on the Inner Life

Most people have very little, if any, real control over circumstances that arise in their lives. They are born into a family, a community, a society, a religious background, an ethnic background, an economic system, an educational system and a raft of customs, traditions, habits and lifeways that they breathe in with every breath as the grow, learn and take their place within the social structure. This structure focuses attention on the outward existence and builds up the persistence of the ego-personality.

The practice of yoga, undertaking conscious spiritual growth, necessarily involves separating oneself from all these fixed habitual patterns so that new understanding, new powers of consciousness, new powers of action can actually manifest. There needs to be a ‘reversal of consciousness’ whereby the yogic practitioner actually responds in an opposite way to the normal external reaction patterns.

A first step in this process is to begin to observe the reactions and understand the patterns that are embedded. A second and further step is to shift the attention to the inner consciousness and away from the external focus. A third step, then is to simply stop attending to the impressions of the external nature. A fourth step is to have the ability to act in the outer world without being swallowed up because of the new inner-directed standpoint and focus.

Sri Aurobindo frequently advised people to “live within — be not shaken by outward happenings.” If we try this, if we work at it, we begin to see a new pattern emerge whereby those outer circumstances bother us less and less and we can remain calm, concentrated and focused in the inner status, even while acting forcefully in the world.

Sri Aurobindo notes: “You should not be so dependent on outward things; it is this attitude that makes you give so excessive an importance to circumstances. I do not say that circumstances cannot help or hinder — but they are circumstances, not the fundamental thing which is in ourselves, and their help or their hindrance ought not to be of primary importance. In yoga, as in every great or serious human effort, there is always bound to be an abundance of adverse interventions and unfavourable circumstances which have to be overcome. To give them too great an importance increases their importance and their power to multiply themselves, gives them, as it were, confidence in themselves and the habit of coming. To face them with equanimity — if one cannot manage a cheerful persistence against them of confident and resolute will — diminishes, on the contrary, their importance and effect and in the end, though not at once, gets rid of their persistence and recurrence. It is therefore a principle in yoga to recognise the determining power of what is within us — for that is the deeper truth — to set that right and establish the inward strength as against the power of outward circumstances. The strength is there — even in the weakest; one has to find it, to unveil it and to keep it in front throughout the journey and the battle.”

Sri Aurobindo and the Mother, Looking from Within, Chapter 1, Looking at Life and Circumstances, pp. 6-7