People struggle all the time with the force of desire and how to deal with it in their lives. For the yogic practitioner this becomes an even greater concern as desire causes countless difficulties in bringing the inner being to a state of peace in which the yogic consciousness can flourish. Stoicism has been tried. Indulgence has been attempted. Some try to control desire by accepting “whatever comes” without question or either attraction or aversion. Many wind up accepting the idea that one can only overcome desire by rejecting the use of will-power; while others believe that it is a weakness of will-power that causes desires to control one’s action despite a wish to avoid carrying out those desires. It is not through an absence of the use of will-power that the solution is found, but it also must be recognised that will-power operates in a different part of the being from those parts most directly driven by the force of desire.
When tamas is predominant in the being, such as when the physical consciousness is in front, there can be a profound lack of will to do anything, to accomplish anything or to participate in anything. The physical consciousness is more driven by whatever force dominates the being at any time than a driver of the action. The action of tamas in the physical consciousness can also impact the higher functions of mind and restrain or at least partially throttle them from their true native power of action.
Dr. Dalal writes: “An aspect of inertia is passivity, which manifests as a weakness of the will. Sri Aurobindo speaks of this as follows: “It [the weakness of the will] is a first result of coming down into the physical consciousness or of the physical consciousness coming up prominently…. The physical consciousness is full of inertia — it wants not to move but to be moved by whatever forces and that is its habit.”
“The physical consciousness or at least the more external parts of it are, as I have told you, in their nature inert — obeying whatever force they are habituated to obey, but not acting on their own initiative. When there is a strong influence of the physical inertia or when one is down in this part of the consciousness the mind feels like the material Nature that action of will is impossible.”
Dr. Dalal concludes: “Weakness of the will may be regarded by some as pertaining to the province of ethics and morality rather than that of psychopathology. However, we must recognize that weakness of the will is a disturbance of volition and as such it is as relevant to psychopathology as disorders of the other two major psychological functions, namely, thinking and feeling.”
Sri Aurobindo and The Mother, Living Within: The Yoga Approach to Psychological Health and Growth, Introduction, Disturbances Associated with the Physical, pp. xxv-xxvii
Santosh has been studying Sri Aurobindo's writings since 1971 and has a daily blog at http://sriaurobindostudies.wordpress.com and podcast at https://anchor.fm/santosh-krinsky He is author of 16 books and is editor-in-chief at Lotus Press. He is president of Institute for Wholistic Education, a non-profit focused on integrating spirituality into daily life.