Understanding the Meaning of Vital Formations and Beings That Arise During Meditation

When people take up the practice of meditation, they generally do not know much about it. They follow a set of guidelines on ‘how to meditate’ and just let things happen. The result is very much dependent, then, on their state of conscious awareness, and their focus of attention. Meditation is not a state that just allows anything to come with no form or purpose. Rather, for it to accomplish its purpose, meditation needs a concentration, an object of meditation. This object of meditation need not be something specific in terms of a result; it can be a concentrated silence, or it can be an aspiration or prayer, it can be a specific issue that the seeker wishes to resolve.

Without an object of meditation, the seeker will frequently find that either all kinds of thoughts and disturbances intrude, or else, that the various vital forces within one take advantage of the void and use the opportunity to come to the forefront and move the individual into association with the vital world or domain where these forces have their native seat or create vital formations that express the vital state of the seeker.

Many people fail to realize that there are these other vital domains that have their own existence. The forces that reside there invade and influence our lives in the physical world, but their influence is somewhat watered-down due to the density of the physical world and the action of the mental forces that also are at work. When one moves into the vital world at the prompting of one of these vital forces, however, the protections of the physical and mental action are essentially removed and one is faced with forces that can exercise power in their own right, and which take forms that can be scary, or intimidating.

These forces can appear before an individual in an unformed meditative state if there is the least receptivity in the being to their vibratory pattern. The seeker may actively create these formations if the meditation is simply passive and allows the vital energies free reign to form themselves. The seeker may be influenced by them, or may reject them, or may find that they highlight weaknesses within himself that need to be addressed. The result depends very much on the strength of the aspiration and the awareness of the seeker in confronting these forces.

A disciple asks: “When one meditates there are moments when one sees very unpleasant forms in front of himself for some days. It begins and later ends. What does it mean?”

The Mother notes: “Yes, it means probably that instead of meditating in a silent concentration, one has opened one’s consciousness either in a vital domain or in a not very pleasant mental domain. That’s what it means. It can also mean — it depends on the degree of development one has reached — it can mean in certain cases, when one is master of one’s concentration and knows where one goes — still this already requires a fairly great discipline — it may be that it is a particular attack of adverse forces, of bad wills, coming either from certain beings or from certain domains; but it is not necessarily attacks; it can simply be that one has opened one’s consciousness in a place that’s not very desirable or else sometimes, often, that one had in himself a number of movements of the vital and the mind which were not very desirable, and when one enters the silence of meditation or that kind of passive attitude of expectation of something which is going to happen, all these vibrations which have gone out of him come back to him in their real appearance which is not very pleasant. This happens often: one had bad feelings, not positively wicked but still things which are not desirable, bad thoughts, movements of dissatisfaction, revolt or impatience, or a lack of contentment or… you see, one may be angry with somebody, even in thought, no need of speaking… things like that. When one is quiet and tries to be still so as to have an experience, all these things come back to him in their true form, that is, not very pleasant forms: very ugly, forms which are at times very ugly. I think that I have already told you this several times: it’s something that happens frequently if you don’t control your thoughts and your vital reactions and if someone has displeased you for some reason or other, if that person has done or said something which you do not like, and you consider him hostile and so the spontaneous reaction is to want to punish him in some way or other or if one is still more primitive — if I may say so — to want to take vengeance or hope that something bad will happen to him.”

“However, it may even come very spontaneously, a violent reaction, like that, then you don’t think about it any more. But now, at night, when you are asleep, ninety-nine times out of a hundred, in a case like this, the person in question comes to you with an extreme violence, either to kill you or to make you ill, as though he wished you as much harm as possible, and then in your ignorance you say, ‘Well, I was quite right to be angry with him.’ But it is quite simply your own formation which returns to you, nothing else but that. The person has nothing to do with it — he is quite innocent in the affair. This is a phenomenon which occurs very often, I mean for people who have movements of rancour or anger or violence; and they always see in a dream of this kind the justification of their movements –whereas it is only a very striking image of their own feelings. For the formation returns upon one in this way.”

Sri Aurobindo and the Mother, The Hidden Forces of Life, Ch. 3 Hidden Forces Around, pp. 71-72