The True Foundation of the Yoga

We are generally so tied to our exte
al ego-personality that we identify with it as what we consider to be our ‘self’. We then refer to this body-life-mind complex as our reality and we say that we ‘have a soul’. The reality is far different. The reality is that the soul, the psychic being, takes on a particular existence for its own purposes of experience and growth. The difference in viewpoint is profound and has far-reaching implications. If we identify with the exte
al personality, we believe that the thoughts, emotions, feelings, reactions, responses, moods and physical action belongs to us, is an essential part of ‘who we are’ and thus, we neither have the needed distance from it to see it clearly and dispassionately, nor do we realistically have the power to excise the movements that we recognise need to be changed or eliminated. We tend, then to try to suppress these reactions, which only makes them stronger through the factor of compression; or else, we acknowledge our failure and fall into depression because we cannot succeed in our yogic endeavour.

On the other hand, if we look at the exte
al body-life-mind complex as something that the soul chooses to inhabit for its own purposes in the divine manifestation, similar to putting on a suit of clothes, it is much easier to gain perspective and to reject or change reactions or habits as not belonging to anything essential to oneself.

Sri Aurobindo writes: “In your dealing with your difficulties and the wrong movements that assail you, you are probably making the mistake of identifying yourself with them too much and regarding them as aprt of your own nature. You should rather draw back from them, detach and dissociate yourself from them, regard them as movements of the universal lower imperfect and impure Nature, forces that enter into you and try to make you their instrument for their self-expression. By so detaching and dissociating yourself it will be more possible for you to discover and to live more and more in a part of yourself, your inner or your psychic being which is not attacked or troubled by these movements, finds them foreign to itself and automatically refuses assent to them and feels itself always turned to or in contact with the Divine Forces and the higher planes of consciousness. Find that part of your being and live in it; to be able to do so is the true foundation of the Yoga.”

Sri Aurobindo, Bases of Yoga, Chapter 3, In Difficulty, pp. 43-44