The Challenge and Difficulty of the Integral Yoga

Every spiritual discipline, every path, has its unique challenges and difficulties. One cannot minimize the issues that anyone taking up the spiritual life must face. Almost all of these paths traditionally have focused on liberation of the individual seeker, regardless of the specific methodology employed. The stories are legendary.

In the Chandogya Upanishad a young seeker approaches a revered teacher and asks for the knowledge of Brahman. The teacher sends him to the forest with a herd of cattle and he was to nurture and protect them until he had 1000 cattle and then he would return to the Guru for the teaching. (The story is told variously as to the number of cattle with which he started). This obviously involved substantial hardship, danger, and a life of isolation for the young seeker. This was no easy path to enlightenment.

Milarepa was set the task by his Guru of building various structures through hard labour, and then taking them apart and re-building them in another location for a period of years. His body was suffering intense pain, he had open sores on his back from the pressure and grinding of the heavy stones he had to carry. Eventually he reached a point of despair after all the suffering with no apparent, to him, progress in his spiritual quest. Thereafter he was given the teachings but his arduous efforts were not ended. He entered into an isolated life living in caves and meditating, often without food or even decent clothing to keep him warm, and for a certain period of times he lived primarily on nettles, which is why he is often depicted with a green cast to his skin. Certainly not an easy path to enlightenment.

So what makes the integral yoga different, and even more difficult? We can look at the integral yoga as essentially a continuation beyond individual liberation, which becomes, then, a foundational phase for the primary objective of the integral yoga, which is to transform the very basis of life through the integration of the next phase of the evolution of consciousness into the earth nature. Individual liberation is hard. Transforming the physical, vital, emotional and mental structures and functionality of all of Nature is an order of magnitude harder. Individual liberation has historically been pursued through what may be seen as ‘cutting the knot’ of human nature, bringing it down to its bare minimum and focusing the entire attention on the practice. Instead of ‘cutting the knot’, the practitioner of the integral yoga is asked to ‘untie the knot’, in a slow and deliberate process that encompasses taking on and modifying all the mental predilections, emotional and vital reactions and responses, and even the physical habits and embedded instinctive behaviour. The progress may not be obvious. The effort is painstaking. The time stretches out beyond that of an individual lifetime. The seeker may spend incredible amounts of effort dealing with various strands of response within him and still be faced with pressures from the environment, attacks from forces hostile to the endeavour and opposition even from those closest to him, friends, family and co-workers. He must arm himself with patience, be prepared for the marathon effort and maintain his courage in the face of all difficulties.

Sri Aurobindo notes: “The goal of Yoga is always hard to reach, but this one is more difficult than any other, and it is only for those who have the call, the capacity, the willingness to face everything and every risk, even the risk of failure, and the will to progress towards an entire selflessness, desirelessness and surrender.”

Sri Aurobindo, Bases of Yoga, Chapter 3, In Difficulty, pg. 58