Along with faith we need aspiration. Aspiration is a call to the Divine to guide and lead us to Him. Because the Divine is the true power of yogic practice and progress, we must learn more and more to call this power to guide us. For this, either a prayer or a silent but concentrated call to the Divine is needed. We must more and more put ourselves into the hands of the Divine; we must extend ourselves and reach towards Him. We must exert our will to turn our life towards the Divine. We must seek for Him with our intuition, our inner feeling. We should develop an inner yearning to find and unite with Him, as if there is a flame rising upwards in us towards the Divine. We can visualize this flame of aspiration and learn to throw into it all the things in us which are inconsistent or resistant to its yearning and endeavor.
Along with faith and aspiration, we need to reject the things in us which are inconsistent with the Divine and a divine life. Our aim is to live in the truth of the Divine existence, a truth in which we are harmonized with the consciousness and will of the Divine and no longer acting as if we were an independent entity separate from everyone and everything else. This sense of being a separate individual is a falsehood; it is an appearance only and not the real truth of things. This false self or ego had its divine purpose in the slow evolution of consciousness from matter to plant to animal to human being — it provided a center for the developing organization of body, life, and mind. But it is not a fundamental reality, nor is it the true Self of the individual; the true Self is one with the Self of all and therefore is in harmony with all. The ego, on the contrary, tries to assert itself independently in a world which it feels is separate and different from it, and indeed is a constant threat to its very existence. Thus the ego is typically in conflict with the world around it and with other egos. As it grows, it learns its interdependence and attempts to harmonize with others, but in the end this is a patchwork effort and cannot succeed because it is founded on the falsehood of separateness. The true unity lies in uniting with the true Self, which is the Self of all.
But realizing this unity is difficult because the ego has had a long history in the evolution of our being; it is ingrained in our very fiber, in our minds, our vitality, and our very body. In the vitality of our being, the ego is closely associated with desires and impulses towards self-assertion. There is a whole range of our psychological existence which is submental and belongs to our animal heritage. Sri Aurobindo calls this the vital being, and it is principally concerned with self-preservation and self-assertion, but operates more or less instinctually rather than mentally — it operates primarily through desire. In humans these desires are entangled with the senses and the intellect. The intellect is a higher power, a later evolutionary stage than the vital, and should lead and dominate the vital. But the vital being usually dominates the mind and uses the mind to help it satisfy its desires. Below the vital being there is a still more obscure layer of our being which has its roots in the physical and is characterized by a tendency towards mindless repetition and inertia. This more obscure layer acts as a kind of brake on all our efforts towards growth and change. Therefore, along with our aspiration we must consciously and persistently reject these elements in us which keep us imprisoned in the false sense of the ego.
The change that is desired in yoga is to replace our whole present sense of self, our whole present life and consciousness with a new one, one that is divine. Therefore, our whole mental outlook, our whole sense of who we are and what we need and want and strive for needs to change into something else that is vast and infinite and divine. In the end everything that we now call ‘ourselves’ will have to be either eliminated or changed. Therefore, this rejection of what is inconsistent with a divine life must be progressive. In practice, we must begin by rejecting those things that we find interfering most obviously in our spiritual endeavor. As we grow in consciousness, we will become aware of more and more things which need to be eliminated or changed.
