While we must let go of old outmoded habits and ways of being as we move forward, we should keep our consciousness turned principally to the Divine and the Light. In other words, there is a negative side to spiritual growth, letting go of old habits of consciousness, and a positive side to spiritual growth, opening up to a new consciousness and new ways of being. We should keep our focus on the latter, and it will greatly facilitate the former. For example, Sri Aurobindo says, “You must keep the temple clean if you wish to install there the living Presence.” (SABCL 25, p. 3) But He also says that if all we do is clean we go very slowly, because the vital gets dirty again; but if we can open ourselves and call into ourselves the peace of the higher consciousness, that is something that is clean in itself.
Along with aspiration and rejection, we need to effect a complete surrender of ourselves into the hands of the Divine. The essential movement of the yoga is self-giving, just as it is the essential movement of all love. We do not do yoga to receive something from the Divine; we do not do yoga to develop our consciousness or our abilities. We do yoga to enter into and unite with the divine Consciousness which is infinitely greater than ourselves. We cannot contain the Divine within ourselves, but we can give ourselves to the Divine who can take us into Himself and remake us in his Light, Love, and Power. When we open ourselves to the Divine, become entirely passive to His Will and to no other — our self-will or the will of others — then the Divine can freely enter into us and effect the necessary changes. The Divine does not impose Himself on us; He waits for our consent, and to confirm that, waits for our call and seeking and resolve. Love and a complete self-giving are the key movements of the yoga.
In surrendering ourselves to the Divine, we must be sincere. Sincerity means that we are thorough-going in our surrender. If we make a surrender of ourselves to the Divine in a moment of piety, but then a few minutes later forget about it and surrender ourselves to our desires, that is not a sincere surrender. It is true that there is a part of us, our soul — Sri Aurobindo refers to it as our psychic being — that is sincere in its self-giving to the Divine. As we learn to live in our soul we experience this sincerity. But in addition to our soul we have a complex mental, vital, and physical consciousness. In fact, there are many different parts of our being that have their own self-will and their own tendencies and habits. Each of these must also surrender themselves to the Divine, and we could say, organize themselves around the psychic being’s central surrender. Instead of having many wills in us each going their own way in conflict with one another and with other wills outside of us, we must become a unified being with a single will that is surrendered to the Divine. We can see that sincerity is not a simple matter and is not effected in a day. Still, from the beginning we can make a genuine central surrender of our being, or at least a central resolve to surrender ourselves to the Divine — and this is very powerful — but it will inevitably require time to make this surrender sincere and encompass all the parts of our being. The central will in us must put pressure on all the separate small wills to conform and align them to the central surrender. Only then can we become a united being surrendered to the One Divine Being.
About the author: Dr. Larry Seidlitz is the Vice-president for Student Affairs at Sri Aurobindo Darshan: The University of Tomorrow, SACAR. He is also a facilitator for several courses in Integral Yoga Psychology, and editor of the journal Collaboration.
