The Individual Action Needed to Implement the Spiritual Path in One’s Life

The vital nature wants to continue its old ways and achieve fulfillment of its desires. It is also very effective at finding ways to convince the mind to carry out its impulses and desires. When an individual takes up the spiritual path, the vital being does not get discouraged, it simply tries to find ways to carry on while paying ‘lip service’ to the spiritual seeking. One of the ways it does that is to latch onto the idea, true in an ultimate sense, that it is the Divine Force which is carrying out the sadhana. It then can conclude that the individual need not do anything because the Divine is responsible and doing it all! This is ultimately an excuse for it to continue in its habitual ways of action and enjoyment by forsaking responsibility for making any changes.

In his book, The Mother, Sri Aurobindo addresses this point clearly: “Note that a tamasic surrender refusing to fulfil the conditions and calling on God to do everything and save one all the trouble and struggle is a deception and does not lead to freedom and perfection.”

The Divine Force acts by providing insight, inspiration, and support to the individual who is charged with undertaking the actions that lead to changes in human nature over time. This implies that there is an effort, an action, by the individual which Sri Aurobindo defines as ‘aspiration, rejection and surrender’. Without this, the ‘idea’ of spirituality is essentially just a mental conception similar to the idea that one can learn to swim by reading a book about swimming, without ever getting in the water! Turning the mind toward the spiritual focus is a positive step. Providing the emotional and vital support for that focus helps to bring it into action. Carrying it out in one’s life, in one’s inner reactions and in one’s exte
al relations, is the implementation that is eventually needed to be successful in the yogic endeavour. Rooting out those ideas, habits, predilections, trained responses and desires that contradict this spiritual action is the process called for, the ‘rejection’ of the old ways and means of living.

Sri Aurobindo writes: “Faith, reliance upo
God, surrender and self-giving to the Divine Power are necessary and indispensable. But reliance upo
God must not be made an excuse for indolence, weakness and surrender to the impulses of the lower Nature: it must go along with untiring aspiration and a persistent rejection of all that comes in the way of the Divine Truth. The surrender to the Divine must not be turned into an excuse, a cloak or an occasion for surrender to one’s own desires and lower movements or to one’s ego….”

Sri Aurobindo and the Mother, Looking from Within, Chapter 5, Attitudes on the Path, pg. 131