The Need for Patience and Perseverance

In today’s modern societies, people expect instant results. They want things to be fast and easy. They respond to ads claiming they can lose weight easily in a few days’ time. They want deliveries from stores to be ove
ight, if not ‘same day’. They would prefer to receive their enlightenment from a pill in many cases! We hear people who indicate that they tried meditation or hatha yoga but got nothing out of it. When pressed, they will admit to trying it for a few brief sessions on and off.

When it comes to the adoption of spiritual practice, then, it is easy to understand the frustration they feel when their weaknesses and limitations don’t easily disappear and they are unable to have ‘headline’ experiences right away. Certainly they do not appreciate the patience of the young seeker of ancient times in India who approached a teacher and asked to become his disciple to learn about the Ete
al. The teacher gave him two cattle and told him to take them into the forest and return when they had multiplied to 1000. The would-be student went off and spent years working on the task, learning how to find food for himself and the cattle, ward off diseases and predators, and otherwise dealing with the weather and other circumstances that could potentially disrupt the process. Eventually, after a number of years of efforts in this direction, he returned to the teacher with a herd of 1000 cattle. The teacher recognised that this student had, along the way, learned from the sun, the moon, the forest, the river, the animals and had indeed achieved enlightened status. The teacher vacated his seat and invited the student to become the teacher.

What we do not generally heed is the long history and embedded traits that have developed within humanity, in our individual being and in our societal setting, which, by virtue of their deeply rooted nature and their long repetition, have become habits or ways of responding that are not so easily changed or dislodged. If it has taken many thousands of years of development for these habitual patterns to develop, how long do we expect it will take to modify them sufficiently that we can say that we have outgrown or gone beyond them? By nature we tend to be conservative, following and abiding by the thoughts, feelings and ways of acting developed in the past.

It is this resistance to change which confronts the yogic practitioner when he seriously begins the quest to transform the nature of his being. Sri Aurobindo points out that even in Nature, change occurs, but it can take thousands of years to work itself out. In the meantime, the habits and atavistic behaviours assert themselves and reappear at any instance.

The challenge then is whether this process of change can be aided and speeded up by some means. It is through the focused practice of yoga, with patience and persistence, that Sri Aurobindo advises that the conscious participation of the seeker can truncate the time needed. This does not mean that it is fast, or easy, within the context of an individual’s lifetime, but that what otherwise might take thousands of years may be brought down to a span of decades potentially. When the individual focuses the aspiration and shifts his standpoint to the divine consciousness, when he calls down the higher spiritual force and opens his being with receptivity, when he steadfastly supports the change despite the pressure of the past habits and the pressure of the society around him, he is able to undertake what may otherwise seem like a waste of time!

Sri Aurobindo writes: “… one must not be distressed or depressed by perceiving the weaknesses inherent in human nature and the difficulty of getting them out. The difficulty is natural, for they have been there for thousands of lives and are the very nature of man’s vital and mental ignorance. It is not surprising that they should have a power to stick and take time to disappear. But there is a true being and a true consciousness that is there in us hidden by the surface formations of nature and which can shake them off once it emerges. By taking the right attitude of selfless devotion within and persisting in it in spite of the surface nature’s troublesome self-repetitions one enables this inner being and consciousness to emerge and with the Mother’s Force, working in it deliver the being from all return of the movements of the old nature.”

Sri Aurobindo and the Mother, Looking from Within, Chapter 2, Looking at Oneself and Others, pg. 40