The Integral Yoga of Sri Aurobindo

CHAPTER XIV

MIND AND ITS PURIFICATION

PART III

PURIFICATION OF THE CHITTA

As we have already said, the citta is the basic stuff of our consciousness, teeming with all sorts of impressions of our immediate and remote past. These chaotic impressions go to nourish our desires and give them different, sometimes even contrary, directions, form most of our physical and vital habits and tendencies, and affect even our thoughts and judgements. Their action is so subtle and often so swift and sudden that, unless one has acquired a yogic detachment, one may not even be aware of it. Much of it is subconscient and unpredictably automatic. Let us take an illustration of it from one of the poems of Sri Aurobindo in quantitative metre¹—a little poem aquiver with a deep, rich poignancy.

THE DREAM BOAT

Who was it that came to me in a boat made of dream-fire, With his flame brow and his sun-gold body ?

¹ Collected Poems by Sri Aurobindo—Vol. II.

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melted was the silence into a sweet secret murmur,

"Do you come now? is the heart's fire ready ?”

Hidden in the recesses of the heart something shuddered,

It recalled all that the life's joy cherished,

Imaged the felicity it must leave lost for ever,

And the boat passed and the gold god vanished.

Low within the hollowness of the world's breast inhabits—

For the love died and the old joy ended—

Void of a felicity that has fled, gone for ever,

And the gold god and the dream boat come not.

The sense of the poem is crystal clear. "The gold god," the hiraṇmaya puruṣa, appears before a devotee who has presumably been praying to Him either to reveal Himself or to take him into His eternal embrace. There is silence within the devotee and without, and a sincerity of call that has obviously induced the revelation. But when the Golden puruṣa actually appears and asks in a "sweet secret murmur," "Do you come now? Is the heart's fire ready?", there is in the devotee a sudden upsurge of the turbid stuff of his unregenerate citta, its old desires and longings and attachments, and something shrinks and shudders, something that is "hidden in the recesses of the heart". He was not perhaps even aware of this subconscient scum, but it was there all the same; and when the moment for the final self-giving came,

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there was an automatic shuddering and quailing,¹ an overpowering of the conscious parts by the dark subconscious energies. "And the boat passed and the gold god vanished."

This tragedy is not a poetic fancy, but a fact enacted in almost every life that aspires to a high self-fulfilment. It happens sometimes that the conscious part of a man's being finds itself ready for a great venture—the will is strung, the gaze of the mind is fixed on the goal, the heart longs and strains for it; and yet when the moment of the irrevocable plunge arrives, something tugs from behind, a wrench is felt, a chord seems to snap somewhere in a remote recess. Its sincerity is clouded by an uprush of involuntary insincerity, its unity of will is obscured and disrupted by many invading desires, and it finds itself floundering in a bog of dismal retrogression. Many a flourishing life is thus stranded or wrecked as a result of the sudden incursions of the subconscient citta. Besides these sudden inroads, the citta exercises a sort of settled insidious control over our thought and action of which we are hardly aware. It is only when a thought has crossed our mind or an action has been done, that we can detect the occult influence,—subtle, tangled and elusive, yet potently pervasive. Even the most masterful intellect often finds itself infected with the noxious

¹cf. Yet was I sore adread

Lest, having Him, I must have naught beside.

FRANCIS THOMSON

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stuff of the citta, which distorts and perverts its reasoning and judgment. One often catches oneself feeling a sort of unaccountable antipathy towards a person for whom one is normally inclined to entertain only feelings of affection and regard. Sometimes we find to our chagrin that we have let slip some words or behaved in a way repugnant to our own reason, strangely actuated by some unknown agency in us. We often fail to come up to certain standards of conduct we have erected in our minds, or stick to certain consistent lines of thought and action, because of the obscuring and thwarting influence of the citta, or the dull drag it imposes upon our nature. It is rarely, indeed, that our thought and feeling and action escape this subtle influence and express our conscious personality and its reason and will.

THE CHIEF IMPURITY

The chief impurity of the citta is a chaotic craving. and hunger for possession and enjoyment. This craving is the chrysalis of desire. Therefore, any serious attempt at the purification of the citta must aim at the eradication of this essential craving. We have already dealt with the process by which we can rid our being of desire, but an important and indispensable part of this initial process is a directing of the Mother's light to the subconscient and its blind energies. A constant detection and uncompromising rejection of all conscious desires must proceed on the basis of the true psychic consciousness,.

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which alone can enable us to detach ourselves from the lower nature and its desires, but a mere detachment from conscious desires is not enough, there must also be a probing and penetration of the depths, and a vigilant observation of the subtle action of the essential craving of the citta. In proportion as the psychic consciousness or the consciousness of the soul grows in the being, the observation of the working of the nature and an analysis of its hidden mechanism will become easier and more precise. But still there will be enough working going on below the surface and occult to our consciousness. It is, therefore, essential that the Mother's Light be called down and directed to these arcane regions. Her Light will illumine the subconscient obscurity and eliminate the impurities with which it abounds, either by a steady process of expulsion or by raising up and working them out, as it thinks best in the interest of a radical purification. All that the sâdhaka is asked to do at this stage is to have a perfect faith in the infallible guidance of the Mother's Light, and a state of unreserved surrender to it. Later, in the course of progress, a stage may come when he has to go down in consciousness into these obscure depths, with the Mother's Light leading .him, for the final grapple with the subconscient and inconscient forces of darkness. For, nothing must be left, not the least vestige of the primitive cravings, that could prolong the action of the Ignorance. All the boundless energy of desires must go to feed the divine Will revealing itself more and more in the being as it undergoes

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the psychic change. It is to be remarked here that' m the Integral Yoga there is no question of killing or crippling the life-energies, whether they manifest them- selves as cravings and passions or as ambitions and aspirations. As the ancient Rishis knew well, all blind energies of the lower nature are but perversions of their spiritual counterparts, and can, therefore, be converted into them. Anger, for instance, is a perversion of the teja of the rudraśakti, which destroys what has to be destroyed, but without any reactions of anger or vindictive violence. It hurls its destructive fire from a poise of all-seeing calm and impelled by the divine Love, which hurts in order to rouse and exalt, and destroys in order to new-create. Lust is a perversion of love, and sorrow and suffering of the essential delight of existence. All these energies will be purified, illumined and converted into their spiritual equivalents by the self- unfolding process of the Integral Yoga, proceeding under the guidance of the Mother's Light and fulfilling itself by the Mother's Force.

DESIRES ARE FORMATIVE ENERGIES

Very few people care to study the working of the energies called desires, which have a powerful formative force, and carry in themselves the potentiality both of happiness and suffering, light and darkness, progress and retrogression. When we desire something with a sustained intensity, we create in us an eddy of subtle-

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energies which sweep out in search of their object, causing many upheavals in our psychological and environmental conditions, and introducing into us elements which are not often congenial to the normal development of our life. And the desires being fickle, the forces and elements they introduce into us are usually of a chaotic and conflicting nature. One desire creates certain psychological reactions and forms certain whirls of energy-vibrations, which may and very often do come into conflict with those of another desire, and a third drives in a different direction, and a fourth in yet another, inviting forces which make havoc of all order and rhythmic progress. That is why we frequently find ourselves surrounded and harassed by conditions which are of such a con- fused and discordant character that they entail nothing but struggle and suffering. Life seems to stumble on through an interminable series of disturbing and disparate phases, zigzagging through steep and perilous paths, and tossing about from one set of circumstances to another. Aimless and rudderless, we drift on the currents and cross-currents of Time. Through birth after birth we chase the same wild geese, the phantom objects of desire, which elude us before we have secured them well within our grasp. Moments of joy and exhilaration are followed by long spells of pain and gloom. But the goad of desire never ceases, a treacherous hope lures us on. If only we could foresee the consequences .before we conceived or indulged desires !

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DESIRE AND WILL

The steady vision -of the Buddha probed into the heart of this mortal disease of desire, and he was perfectly right in his insistence on the extermination of desire as the surest way to the attainment of freedom from the agony of rebirth. But he failed to probe beyond the desires into the Will of which they are but darkened and distorted fragments in the ignorance. If the distortions are removed, we get at a concentration of radiant energy which is the real motive power of our whole nature, swabhāva, seeking an unhampered play and fulfilment in our life. It is the self-expressive élan of the fire and force of our being—the central will, one yet multiple, and attuned to, or more precisely, an individual self-formation of, the universal divine Will. To destroy the distortions and preserve the will, the real motive power of our swabhāva, and unite it with the self-revealing divine Will, is then the whole method and aim of our dealing with prāṇa and its desires. And that goes a long way in purifying the citta.

Dealing with the subject of purification, Sri Aurobindo says in his The Synthesis of Yoga, "The essential turn of the soul to possession and enjoyment of the world consists in a will to delight, and the enjoyment of the satisfaction of craving is only a vital and physical degradation of the will to delight.... To tread down altogether the prāṇa, the vital being, is to kill the force of life by

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which the large action of the embodied soul in the human being must be supported, to indulge the gross will to live is to remain satisfied with imperfection; to com- promise between them is to stop half way and possess neither earth nor heaven. But if we get at the pure will undeformed by desire,—which we shall find to be a much more free, tranquil, steady and effective force than the leaping, smoke-stifled, soon fatigued and baffled flame of desire,—and at the calm inner will of delight not afflicted or limited by any trouble of craving, we can then transform the prāṇa from a tyrant, enemy, assailant of the mind into an obedient instrument.,.. To rid the prāṇa of desire and incidentally to reverse the ordinary poise of our nature and turn the vital being from a troublesomely dominant power into the obedient instrument of a free and unattached mind, is then the first step in purification. As this deformation of the psychic prāṇa is corrected, the purification of the rest of the intermediary parts of the antaḥkaraṇa is facilitated, and when that correction is completed, their purification too can be easily made absolute".

PURIFICATION OF THE EMOTIONAL BEING

The essential cravings of the citta enter into the emotions of our heart and create there emotional responses and reactions of rāgā-dweṣa, liking and disliking. If we watch our heart from the serene poise of the enlightened

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buddhi, or, better Still from the luminous calm of the soul, we shall see that it is constantly subjected to the tyranny of alternating emotions, caused by the impacts of the outer world. The emotional mind is rightly likened to a sea, tossing with the waves of love and hate, attraction and repulsion, hope and fear, joy and grief. It is always restless, always agitated, except when it is fatigued or depressed. And the emotions heave not only the heart, they convulse and tear the whole being; they even cloud and pervert the intellect and deflect it from its course. This automatic action of rāgā-dweṣa derives from our mental, vital and nervous habits in the formation of which the citta has a considerable hand. The whole structure of these formed habits has to be pulled down in order that our psychological being may be remoulded by the force and substance of the soul.

The sway of the emotional dualities derives its strength and tenacity from attachment. The renunciation of desires and a steady practice of detachment will weaken and finally annul the hold of attachment; but even when attachment has lost all its power, a habitual, mechanical action of rāgā-dweṣa may continue for some time by the sheer force of habit. It can then be more easily got rid of by the will of the illumined buddhi. A complete elimination of rāgā-dweṣa from the emotional mind may lead to one of the three following results: (1) "a neutral condition of blank indifference," (2) "a luminous state of peaceful impartiality" and (3) a universal psychic love and an un- troubled sweetness and clarity, receiving and responding

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to all contacts of the world with an equal delight. In the Integral Yoga there is no nirodha or suppression of the emotional movements, citta vṛttis. Like the other movements of the nature, they too have to be purified and transformed. Behind the tossing and heaving of the human heart, there is the tranquil heart of psychic emotions, radiant and rhythmic in its self-expression. All its emotions are waves of love and joy, deploying infinite variations and even embracing all human relations, but divinely secure against any deformation or degradation by desire. This psychic heart has to be released into expression, and its emotions of love and joy must take the place of the normal, agitating dualities of the human heart. A progressive infusion of the psychic emotions into the outer heart will revolutionise the latter and impart to it a glowing rapture and sweetness and musical cadence, which characterise the emotions of the gods. The emotions of the psychic heart are perfectly immune to all attacks of fear, grief, pain, hatred and depression, whether they rise from the unreclaimed citta or assail from the environmental nature; and when they occupy and begin their play in the human heart, they change it from a cauldron of conflicting emotions into a perennial fount of universal love and joy.

The essential function of the emotions is a rhythmic expression of the love and delight the being feels in its contacts with Reality, inner and outer. Their business is not to dictate or direct the thought of the mind or the actions of the vital-physical being. If they did, they would

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give rise to a dharma-śankara, a confusion of the essential functions of the members of the being, which should act in a perfect autonomy in an integrated scheme of organic harmony. The general nature of man is, however, such a dharma-śankara,—a hopeless tangle and confusion. His emotions vitiate his thought and reason, obscure his perception, and seek to deflect him from the right course of action. But the psychic emotions only contribute their characteristic warmth and throb to the thought and judgement of the buddhi, and a thrill and glow to the movements of the physical being. The choice of thought and action must lie with the buddhi, and later on in the sâdhanâ, with the supramental Truth-Consciousness, possessing and perfecting the whole nature, but never with the emotional being.

THE TWO BASIC MOVEMENTS IN PURIFICATION

The entire process of the purification of the mind boils down to two most important basic movements: (l) the emergence and increasing control of the psychic or the soul, and (2) the sincerity and completeness of the surrender of our integral being to the Consciousness-Force of the Mother. Psychic detachment, psychic love and devotion and psychic offering are the most effective means of delivering the nature-parts from the darkness of egoistic ignorance and initiating in them the reign of Light and Love and Bliss. And a full and conscious surrender to the Mother's Force and Light is the only way to illumine and

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transform the citta and abolish its uncanny hold upon. the different parts of our nature. For, the human mind even at its best, is incapable of dealing with the subconscient and the inconscient, and it is these, as we have seen that dominate the major portion of our nature. The practice of psycho-analysis or any other current psychological expedients for the raising up and purification of the subconscient energies is fraught with serious dangers from the Yogic standpoint, besides being puerile and superficial. Does the psychologist know how much of his own subconscient and his personal prepossessions and predilections enters into his deductions and hypotheses ? How can he hope to be able to take an impersonal and disinterested view of the data of his observation, so long as he has not himself become disinterested and impersonal?¹ And how can he become an impersonal witness, so long as he has not discovered and realised something in himself that surpasses his shifting phenomenal personality? All ancient tradition bases true knowledge on the discovery and attainment of the soul, the imperishable entity in our perishable earthly tenement. This soul must be made the priest and leader of our spiritual journey. In the Integral Yoga the lead and control of the psychic being is of the utmost importance. "If the inmost soul is awaken- ed, if there is a new birth out of the mere mental, vital and physical into the psychic consciousness, then this Yoga can be done; otherwise (by the sole power of the

¹Jung rightly insists on the self-education of the psychologist.

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mind or any other part) it is impossible."¹ The lead of the human intellect is a foolish and futile endeavour. And so far as the subconscient and the inconscient are concerned, even the lead of the psychic is not enough—it has to be fortified and directed by the supreme Light, the ṛtam jyotiḥ, of the Mother, otherwise it will be difficult to avoid a repetition of the deplorable tragedy of the Tantric experiment which, losing hold of the light it had started with, —though it was not the highest light—sank into the swamp of the subconscient, and could never rise again. For, the darkness is great there below, its forces are blind and subtle and dangerous, and the temptations of power almost irresistible. It is the supramental Light of the Mother alone that can protect and pilot us in those obscure seas of our own being.

¹On Yoga-11 by Sri Aurobindo.

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