The Yoga approach to psychological health and growth. Selections from the Works of Sri Aurobindo and The Mother.
Integral Yoga
THEME/S
Our psychological state is normally characterized by continual disturbances of varying degrees of severity. Some of the common disturbances are fear, anxiety, depression, insecurity, restlessness, anger, jealousy, suspicion, etc. Up to a certain degree, such disturbances are considered “normal”. When the disturbances experienced by an individual exceed what is regarded as normal, the person is said to be suffering from a lack of “mental health”. When disturbances reach extreme proportions and significantly disable an individual, the person is deemed to be suffering from mental illness. Thus mental health is generally understood as absence of marked psychological disturbances.
An increasing number of people, however, find such a view of mental health unsatisfactory for two reasons. First, it is felt that mental health should consist in certain positive characteristics which impart a positive sense of psychological well-being, such as peace, inner security, confidence, a sense of mastery, etc.; the mere absence of significant disturbances does not constitute mental health. Secondly, people are beginning to realize that it is not only the more acute disturbances such as anxiety, depression, agitation, etc. that impair mental health; even such things as the constant chatter and distractibility of the mind, the perpetual hankering for different objects of desire, the recurrent pull of inertia, etc. — which few look upon as psychological disturbances — are felt by more and more people as states that mar inner well-being and therefore denote a lack of mental health.
To such people, yoga may have something valuable to
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offer, For yoga is a psychological approach which aims at a radical change of consciousness so as to lead to a state of immutable and unconditioned peace, freedom and joy. The perfect yogic state has been described as not only free from all disturbances, but also immune to them by virtue of its positive characteristics.
Every system of psychological healing is based on a certain conception of the nature of the human being — what a human being is made up of, what is normal about human nature, and what constitutes an abnormality or a disturbance. Therefore, in order to apply any methods of psychological healing, it is necessary to understand the conception of human nature and about the psychological disturbances on which the methods are based. This introductory chapter aims at explaining the nature of the human being, of psychological disturbances and of mental health in the light of Integral Yoga of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother. Without a good grasp of these explanations it would be difficult to follow much of what is contained in the rest of the book.
Our being is a complex amalgam of many different elements. We are vaguely conscious of only the more superficial ones. Apart from the body and its sensations, we are to some extent conscious of various psychological elements, such as thoughts, feelings, desires, impulses, etc., all of which are lumped together and generally referred to as the “mind”. However, from the viewpoint of Integral Yoga, our being is made up of various distinct parts. As Sri Aurobindo remarks:
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“The ‘Mind’ in the ordinary use of the word covers indiscriminately the whole consciousness, for man is a mental being and mentalises everything...”
“Each plane of our being — mental, vital, physical — has its own consciousness, separate though interconnected and interacting, but to our outer mind and sense, in our waking experience, they are all confused together. ”?
The three parts of the being referred to above — mental, vital, physical — constitute the outer being, each part having its own distinct nature and characteristics. Below is a brief description of each of these three parts in Sri Aurobindo’s words:
“... in the language of this yoga the words ‘mind’ and ‘mental’ are used to connote specially the part of the nature which has to do with cognition and intelligence, with ideas, with mental or thought perceptions, the reactions of thought to things, with the truly mental movements and formations, mental vision and will, etc., that are part of the intelligence. The vital has to be carefully distinguished from mind, even though it has a mind element transfused into it; the vital is the Lifenature made up of desires, sensations, feelings, passions, energies of action, will of desire, reactions of the desire-soul in man and of all that play of possessive and other related instincts, anger, fear, greed, lust, etc., that belong to this field of the nature. Mind and vital
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are mixed up on the surface of the consciousness, but they are quite separate forces in themselves and as soon as one gets behind the ordinary surface consciousness one sees them as separate, discovers their distinction and can with the aid of this knowledge analyse their surface mixtures.’
“The body... has its own consciousness and acts from it, even without any mental will of our own or even against that will, and our surface mind knows very little about this body-consciousness, feels it only in an imperfect way, sees only its results and has the greatest difficulty in finding out their causes.””*
“In many things, in matters of health and illness for instance, in all automatic functionings, the body acts on its own and is not a servant of the mind. If it is fatigued, it can offer a passive resistance to the mind’s will. It can cloud the mind with tamas, inertia, dullness, fumes of the subconscient so that the mind cannot act. The arm lifts, no doubt, when it gets the suggestion, but at first the legs do not obey when they are asked to walk; they have to learn how to leave the crawling attitude and movement and take up the erect and ambulatory habit. When you first ask the hand to draw a straight line or to play music, it can’t do it and won’t do it. It has to be schooled, trained, taught, and afterwards it does automatically what is required of it. All this proves that there is a body-consciousness which can do things at the mind’s order, but has to be awakened, trained, made a
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good and conscious instrument.”
(It should be noted that the body-consciousness is only part of the whole physical consciousness; the latter permeates also the vital and the mental.)
Since the various parts of the being are interconnected, they interact on one another, resulting in distinguishable subdivisions within each part of the being. Thus, besides the mind proper, there is a part of the mind which is interfused with the vital, called the vital mind. There is also a part of the mind which is interfused with the physical, called the physical mind. Similar subdivisions exist within the vital and the physical. Three of these various subdivisions are particularly relevant to the subject-matter of this compilation, and are described below. These three subdivisions are: the physical mind, the vital mind and the vital physical.
The physical mind is the aspect of the mind which partakes of the characteristics of the physical consciousness. Some of the chief characteristics of the physical, namely, inertia, the tendency to act mechanically like an automaton, repetitiveness, constriction and chaotic activity are reflected in the physical mind in the form of mental torpor, doubt, obscurity, confusion, mechanical reactions to things and habitual modes of thinking. The part of the physical mind which is closest to the physical is referred to as the mechanical mind: it acts like a machine that goes on
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turning round and round whatever thoughts occur in it.
The vital mind is influenced by vital forces and movements, and therefore cannot think freely and independently of such influences as the thinking mind can do. The function of the vital mind is not to think or reason, but to dream and imagine, whether it is about success or failure, enjoyment or suffering, good fortune or ill fortune.
The vital physical refers to the part of the physical that is intermixed with the vital. It is this part that is involved in the reactions of the nerves and the reflexive sensations and feelings. It is also the agent of pain.
From the viewpoint of Integral Yoga, each part of the outer being has certain inherent psychological disturbances. The following sections delineate the disturbances associated with each of the different parts mentioned above.
From one viewpoint, the root cause of all psychological disturbances lies in the nature of the mind. The peculiar characteristic of mental consciousness is that it is selfreflective, that is, it can objectivise itself. One part of the mind can separate itself and watch the rest as an object. The part that stands back serves as a mirror which reflects to the mind its own state. This objectivising nature of the mind accounts for the very awareness of psychological disturbances. Secondly, the agony of any disturbance is magnified by several other factors related to the mind, such as memory, anticipation, imagination and the mind’s inherent need — in the face of its essential incapacity — to
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understand and find a solution to the problems causing the disturbances.
Whereas simple awareness through objectivisation belongs to the mind proper, the fearful imaginations and anticipations, resulting in anxiety, come from the part of the mind intermixed with the vital, called the vital mind.
Another manifestation of the vital mind in relation to psychological disturbances is to be seen in the so-called “defense mechanisms” associated with all psychiatric disorders. A defense mechanism is defined as a means of warding off a painful feeling, such as anxiety, guilt, etc., from the level of awareness. One of the chief defense mechanisms is that of rationalization, by which the mind colludes with the vital in providing specious explanations and justifications for impulses and desires of the vital. As Sri Aurobindo states:
“The vital started in its evolution with obedience to impulse and no reason — as for strategy, the only strategy it understands is some tactics by which it can compass its desires. It does not like the voice of knowledge and wisdom — but curiously enough by the necessity which has grown up in man of justifying action by reason, the vital mind has developed a strategy of its own which is to get the reason to find out reasons for justifying its own feelings and impulses.”
Another example of a defense mechanism is that of projection, by which we tend to attribute a feeling or motive to another person who, in fact, does not have that feeling or motive. Such a phenomenon is due to the fact
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that the cognitive functions of perception and judgment are, in most human beings, strongly influenced by the feelings and impulses of the vital. As the Mother observes:
“The sense organs are under the influence of the psychological state of the individual because something comes in between the eye’s perception and the brain’s reception. It is very subtle; the brain receives the eye’s perceptions through the nerves; there is no reasoning, it is so to say instantaneous, but there is a short passage between the eye’s perception and the cell which is to respond and evaluate it in the brain. And it is this evaluation of the brain which is under the influence of feelings. It is the small vibration between what the eye sees and what the brain estimates which often falsifies the response. And it is not a question of good faith, for even the most sincere persons do not know what is happening, even very calm people, without any violent emotion, who do not even feel an emotion, are influenced in this way without being aware of the intervention of this little falsifying vibration.
“It is only when you have conquered all attraction and all repulsion that you can have a correct judgment. As long as there are things that attract you and things that repel you, it is not possible for you to have an absolutely sure functioning of the senses.”
What is called a projection in psychopathology is simply an exaggeration of the everyday distortion of our perceptions and judgments by the vital mind alluded to in the
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above-quoted passage.
Less obvious forms of disturbances attributable to the mind are related to the part of the mind that is intermixed with the physical consciousness, called the physical mind. The mechanical and chaotic activity of physical consciousness, mentioned previously, is reflected in the ceaseless and incoherent thought activity which turns the mind into a veritable market-place where thoughts constantly come and go in a disorderly manner.
Related to the chaotic nature of the physical mind are its features of unsteadiness and susceptibility to the influence of the physical things which determine to a large extent the way most people think. Referring to this susceptibility to the external determinants of ordinary thinking, the Mother remarks:
“One believes he has his own way of thinking. Not at all. It depends totally upon the people one speaks with or the books he has read or on the mood he is in. It depends also on whether you have a good or bad digestion, it depends on whether you are shut up in a room without proper ventilation or whether you are in the open air; it depends on whether you have a beautiful landscape before you; it depends on whether there is sunshine or rain! You are not aware of it, but you think all kinds of things, completely different according to a heap of things which have nothing to do with youl”
Most people, who are not aware of the chaotic activity of the physical mind and its unsteadiness, do not experience
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these characteristics of the mind as disturbances. It is only when one takes up a discipline for quieting or controlling the mind that one realises the presence of these deeply-rooted disturbances.
Another characteristic of the physical consciousness which influences the mind is its mechanical repetitiveness. This trait is manifested in the automatic recurrences of thoughts and words to which the physical mind is prone. Again, most people are either not aware or not disturbed by such repetitive thoughts unless the thoughts are of an upsetting nature, such as hostile, guilt-laden or lewd thoughts, and become of an obsessive nature so that one is unable to stop them.
Still another psychological disturbance related to the physical mind stems from the obscurity of the physical consciousness, leading to perpetual doubt. Here too, though the disturbance is inherent in the very nature of the physical mind, one usually becomes aware of it only when the disturbance is pronounced and manifests in compulsive behaviour, such as the compulsion to check and re-check if a door has been locked or if the gas has been turned off.
One form of doubt that plagues the physical mind is indecision in the face of several desires pulling from different directions. When such an indecision takes an extreme form, paralyzing the action, it is recognized as a pathological symptom, referred to as ebulia. However, in its milder form, indecision is a normal characteristic in all those who have a somewhat active physical mind. Regarding the dynamics of indecision, Sri Aurobindo observes: “Those who can’t choose, have the vital indecision and it is usually due to a too active physical mind, seeing too
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many things or too many sides at a time,”
From what has been stated above regarding the disturbances of the physical mind, it should be apparent that the obsessive-compulsive neurosis — characterized by obsessive thoughts, compulsive behaviour, indecision, etc. ~ is related chiefly to the physical mind.
The vital, like the mind, has certain inherent disturbances of its own. Being the seat and source of desires and longings, the vital constitutes one of the chief psychological disturbances, though extremely few people are conscious enough to experience desire as a disturbance. The fact that desire constitutes a disturbance or suffering is well brought out in the following remarks made by the Mother in response to the question: Where does desire come from?
“The Buddha said that it comes from ignorance. It is more or less that. It is something in the being which fancies that it needs something else in order to be satisfied. And the proof that it is ignorance is that when one has satisfied it, one no longer cares for it, at least ninety-nine and a half times out of a hundred. I believe, right at its origin it is an obscure need for growth, as in the lowest forms of life love is changed into the need to swallow, absorb, become joined with another thing. This is the most primitive form of love in the lowest forms of life, it is to take and absorb. Well, the need to
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take is desire. So perhaps if we went back far enough into the last depths of the inconscience, we could say that the origin of desire is love. It is love in its obscurest and most unconscious form. It is a need to become joined with something, an attraction, a need to take, you see.
“Take for instance... you see something which is — which seems to you or is — very beautiful, very harmonious, very pleasant; if you have the true consciousness, you experience this joy of seeing, of being in a conscious contact with something very beautiful, very harmonious, and then that’s all. It stops there. You have the joy of it — that such a thing exists, you see. And this is quite common among artists who have a sense of beauty. For example, an artist may see a beautiful creature and have the joy of observing the beauty, grace, harmony of movement and all that, and that’s all. It stops there. He is perfectly happy, perfectly satisfied, because he has seen something beautiful. An ordinary consciousness, altogether ordinary, dull like all ordinary consciousness — as soon as it sees something beautiful, whether it be an object or a person, hop! ‘I want it!’ It is deplorable, you know. And into the bargain it doesn’t even have the joy of the beauty, because it has the anguish of desire. It misses that and has nothing in exchange, because there is nothing pleasant in desiring anything. It only puts you in an unpleasant state, that’s all.’"”
The chief point to be noted in the above-quoted passage that the “anguish of desire” constitutes an inherent
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disturbance of the vital. As long as the vital consciousness prevails, one is in “an unpleasant state” of desiring, and it is impossible to have inner peace. ;
Besides desire, the vital is the spring of a host of other disturbing feelings. One of the chief vital disturbances is fear. As a rule, human beings are constantly subject to fear, though very few are aware of the continual undercurrent of fear. As the Mother observes:
“The normal human condition is a state filled with apprehensions and fears; if you observe your mind deeply for ten minutes, you will find that for nine out of ten it is full of fears — it carries in it fear about many things, big and small, near and far, seen and unseen, and though you do not usually take conscious notice of it, it is there all the same.”™
It is not surprising, therefore, that anxiety, which is simply “fear spread thin”, is the commonest of all psychiatric symptoms.
Closely related to fear are two other major disturbances of the vital, namely, anger and depression. The Mother says the following about these two feelings:
“...one is almost constantly in an ordinary vital state where the least unpleasant thing very spontaneously and easily brings you depression — depression if you are a weak person, revolt if you are a strong one. Every desire which is not satisfied, every impulse which meets an obstacle, every unpleasant contact with outside things, very easily and very spontaneously creates depression
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or revolt, for that is the normal state of things.”
Whereas depression is experienced by everyone as an unpleasant or disturbed state, not many realise that the antipode of depression, namely, anger (referred to as revolt in the above-quoted passage), equally constitutes a disturbance. One has only to consider the psychosomatic effects of anger to realise this fact.»
Besides desire, depression, and anger spoken of above, there are many other manifestations of the vital which lead to a psychological disturbance. One such manifestation, which deserves mention because of its wide prevalence in our times, is impatience. Since a desire, unless checked by the mental will or by another counteracting desire, has an innate drive to satisfy itself immediately, impatience may be said to be an essential characteristic of the vital. And the stronger the desire, the greater the impatience. It is this tendency of the vital which is at the basis of the “time urgency” of present-day civilization, and which has been identified as one of the chief traits that characterize what Freidman and Rosenman have labeled Type A behaviour, regarded by these noted researchers in the field of cardiology as the chief factor in coronary artery and heart disease and high blood pressure. (In extract no. 89 [pp. 62-63] of this compilation, the Mother alludes to this “hurry sickness” with a prophetic hint regarding its consequences as reflected in the high present-day incidence of strokes and heart attacks.)
It is not only the unpleasant feelings such as those discussed above that cause a disturbance. The excitement
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produced by pleasant feelings also leads to a definite psychophysiological disturbance. An interesting corroboration of this fact is provided by two medical researchers, Holmes and Rahe, who have developed the Life Change Index — an inventory that gives statistical values to various common life-events with regard to the degree of stress each type of event produces in an average person. The inventory includes not only such unhappy incidents as the death of a spouse, being fired from a job, etc., but also happy events such as marriage, outstanding personal achievements, etc. It is interesting that the inventory gives a higher stress-production value to a vacation and to Christmas than to being convicted of minor violations of the law! Holmes and Rahe attribute the stress caused by various life-events to the adaptation that a person is called upon to make in response to the changes produced by an event. However, the underlying factor which disturbs the homeostatic equilibrium is undeniably emotional, and pertains to the vital.
These findings in the field of medical research corroborate the view of Integral Yoga that suffering is inherent in the very nature of the untransformed vital, and consequently even what is experienced as a pleasant excitation of the vital leads to disturbances.
The fact that repression of the vital leads to disturbances is well-recognized both in psychiatry and yoga, and therefore need not be elaborated here. What is not recognized in psychiatry is that the free expression of the vital, too, produces disturbances. Even though most psychiatrists would recommend moderation in the satisfaction of desires, such a recommendation is based upon commonsense and physiological considerations rather than on psychiatric principles. For psychiatry knows of no specific
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psychological disturbances resulting from an excessive satisfaction of desires. And as for the normal expression of desires, this is deemed not only perfectly all right but indispensable for maintaining psychological health.
Yoga, on the other hand, looks upon desiring per se as a disturbance. The metapsychology of such a view is expressed in the following words of the Mother:
“To have needs is to assert a weakness; to claim something proves that we lack what we claim. To desire is to be impotent; it is to recognise our limitations and confess our incapacity to overcome them.”
As for the free play of desires, yoga holds that “this brings on fairly serious disorders.’
The essential morbidity of the untransformed vital nature is particularly evident in its masochistic tendency to continue clinging to a disturbance and to wallow in it. Sri Aurobindo refers to this trait in the following extract from a letter:
“. . . a habit of the human vital — the tendency to keep any touch of grief, anger, vexation, etc. or any kind of emotional, vital or mental disturbance, to make much of it, to prolong it, not to wish to let it go, to return to it even when the cause of disturbance is past and could be forgotten, always to remember and bring it up when it can. This is a common trait of the human nature and a quite customary movement.”
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The most prominent characteristic of physical consciousness is inertia or Tamas. Therefore an individual with a predominantly physical consciousness is slow in reacting to stimulation. It needs a violent stimulus to produce an emotional reaction in tamasic individuals. As the Mother remarks about such persons:
“... they always need new excitements, dramas, murders, suicides, etc. to get the impression of something. .. . And there is nothing, nothing that makes one more wicked and cruel than tamas. For it is this need of excitement which shakes you up a little, makes you come out of yourself.”
Because of the inertia of physical consciousness, what is experienced as a pleasant intensity of a stimulus by the average person is too feeble or dull for the individual whose consciousness is chiefly that of the physical. In order to feel a pleasant stimulation, such a tamasic individual needs a violent stimulus, such that an average person would experience as unpleasant or even painful. Such a condition represents a psychological disturbance because it is a form of masochism — a state in which an individual finds pleasurable something that is experienced by most people as painful. Thus some forms of masochistic disorders are related to the physical consciousness.
An aspect of inertia is passivity, which manifests as a weakness of the will. Sri Aurobindo speaks of this as follows:
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“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.”
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.
What have been called habit disorders in psychiatry are also partly related to the physical consciousness, for the force of habit is derived from the inertia and mechanical repetitiveness of physical consciousness. As Sri Aurobindo explains:
“In the physical being the power of past impressions
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is very great, because it is by the process of repeated impressions that consciousness was made to manifest in matter — and also by the habitual reactions of consciousness to these impressions, what the psychologists, I suppose, would call behaviour.”
“The physical is the slave of certain forces which create a habit and drive it through the mechanical power of the habit. So long as the mind gives consent, you do not notice the slavery; but if the mind withdraws its consent, then you feel the servitude, you feel a force pushing you in spite of the mind’s will. It is very obstinate and repeats itself till the habit, the inner habit revealing itself in the outward act, is broken. It is like a machine which once set in motion repeats the same movement.”
As stated previously, the part of the physical that is intermixed with the vital, called the vital-physical, governs reactions of the nerves. As the nerves are involved in all psychological disturbances and most physiological ones as well, Sri Aurobindo observes: “It [the vital-physical] is also largely responsible for most of the suffering and disease of mind or body to which the physical being is subject in Nature.”
Not mentioned so far is the subconscient — part of the being which, from the evolutionary point of view, precedes
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and is more primitive than the physical consciousness. It includes those concealed parts of the mental, the vital and the physical which have no waking consciousness in them. Everything that enters our consciousness sinks into the subconscient. Besides, all that is suppressed from conscious awareness without being eradicated is also pushed into the subconscient. The following extracts from Sri Aurobindo’s letters elaborate upon what has just been stated about the nature of the subconscient and mention some of the chief disturbances associated with this part of the being.
“That part of us which we can strictly call subconscient because it is below the level of mind and conscious life, inferior and obscure, covers the purely physical and vital elements of our constitution of bodily being, unmentalised, unobserved by the mind, uncontrolled by it in their action. It can be held to include the dumb occult consciousness, dynamic but not sensed by us, which operates in the cells and nerves and all the corporeal stuff and adjusts their life process and automatic responses. It covers also those lowest functionings of submerged sense-mind which are more operative in the animal and in plant life.”
“. . . all that is consciously experienced sinks down into the subconscient, not as precise though submerged memories but as obscure yet obstinate impressions of experience, and these can come up at any time as dreams, as mechanical repetitions of past thought, feelings, action, etc., as ‘complexes’ exploding into action
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and event, etc., etc. The subconscient is the main cause why all things repeat themselves and nothing ever gets changed except in appearance. It is the cause why people say character cannot be changed, the cause also of the constant return of things one hoped to have got rid of for ever. All seeds are there and all Sanskaras of the mind, vital and body, . . . All too that is suppressed without being wholly got rid of sinks down there and remains as seed ready to surge up or sprout up at any moment. ””
“It is a known psychological law that whatever is suppressed in the conscious mind remains in the subconscient being and recurs either in the waking state when the control is removed or else in sleep. Mental control by itself cannot eradicate anything entirely out of the being.. The subconscient in the ordinary man includes the larger part of the vital being and the physical mind and also the secret body-conciousness.”
“The habit of strong recurrence of the same things in our physical consciousness, so that it is difficult to get rid of its habits, is largely due to a subconscient support. The subconscient is full of irrational habits.’
“we mean by the subconscient that quite submerged part of our being in which there is no wakingly conscious and coherent thought, will or feeling or organized reaction, but which yet receives obscurely the impressions of all things and stores them up in itself and
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and from it too all sorts of stimuli, of persistent habitual movements, crudely repeated or disguised in strange forms can surge up into dream or into the waking nature. For if these impressions rise up most in dream in an incoherent and disorganized manner, they can also and do rise up into our waking consciousness as a mechanical repetition of old thoughts, old mental, vital and physical habits or an obscure stimulus to sensations, actions, emotions which do not originate in or from our conscious thought or will and are even often Opposed to its perceptions, choice or dictates. In the subconscient there is an obscure mind full of obstinate Sanskaras, impressions, associations, fixed notions, habitual reactions formed by our past, an obscure vital full of the seeds of habitual desires, sensations and nervous reactions, a most obscure material which governs much that has to do with the condition of the body. It is largely responsible for our illnesses; chronic or repeated illnesses are indeed mainly due to the subconscient and its obstinate memory and habit of repetition of whatever has impressed itself upon the body-consciousness.”
More concealed disturbances which are related to the subconscient are the prenatal influences of the parents on the infant. The state of consciousness of the parents at the time of conception is regarded in yoga psychology as a powerful factor that underlies the physical, intellectual and characterological defects and deficiencies which a child may manifest. In response to a question whether the
wickedness found in some children is due to the fact that the parents did not wish to have the children, the Mother makes certain emphatic and categorical statements regarding the subconscient influence of the parents on the new-born. She says:
“It is perhaps a subconscious wickedness in the parents. It is said that people throw out their wickedness from themselves by giving it birth in their children. One has always a shadow in oneself. There are people who project this outside — that does not always free them from it, but still perhaps it comforts them! But it is the child who ‘profits’ by it, don’t you see? It is quite evident that the state of consciousness in which the parents are at that moment [of conception] is of capital importance. If they have very low and vulgar ideas, the children will reflect them quite certainly. And all these children who are ill-formed, ill-bred, incomplete (specially from the point of view of intelligence: with holes, things missing), children who are only half-conscious and half-formed — this is always due to the fault of the state of consciousness in which the parents were when they conceived the child. Even as the state of consciousness of the last moments of life is of capital importance for the future of the one who is departing, so too the state of consciousness in which the parents are at the moment of conception gives a sort of stamp to the child, which it will reflect throughout its life. So, these are apparently such little things — the mood of the moment, the moment's aspiration or degradation, anything whatsoever, everything that takes place at a particular moment — it seems to be so small a thing, and it
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has so great a consequence: it brings into the world a child who is incomplete or wicked or finally a failure. And people are not aware of that.
“Later, when the child behaves nastily, they scold it. But they should begin by scolding themselves, telling themselves: ‘In what a horrible state of consciousness must I have been when I brought that child into the world’. For it is truly that. ””
It should be clear from the foregoing description of various psychological disturbances that, from the viewpoint of Integral Yoga, psychological health consists in emerging into a state of consciousness which is free from the disturbing influences of physical, vital, mental and subconscient parts of our being. It implies discovering and being in contact with a part of our being other than the physical, the vital and the mental. Integral Yoga speaks of several such parts of the being which are either behind or above the outer being of mind, vital and body. What looms large in the practice of Integral Yoga is the part of the being referred to as the psychic being. As the term “psychic” is commonly used with different meanings, we quote below Sri Aurobindo’s explanations of the term as used in Integral Yoga.
“The word psychic is used in English to indicate anything that is other or deeper than the external mind, life and body or it indicates sometimes anything occult
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or supraphysical; but that is a use which brings confusion and error and we have almost entirely to discard AE
“What is meant in the terminology of the yoga by the psychic is the soul element in the nature, the pure psyche or divine nucleus which stands behind mind, life and body (it is not the ego) but of which we are only dimly aware. It is a portion of the Divine and permanent from life to life, taking the experience of life through its outer instruments. As this experience grows it manifests a developing psychic personality which insisting always on the good, true and beautiful, finally becomes ready and strong enough to turn the nature towards the Divine. It can then come entirely forward, breaking through the mental, vital and physical screen, govern the instincts and transform the nature. Nature no longer imposes itself on the soul, but the soul, the Purusha, imposes its dictates on the nature”.”
“The word soul is very vaguely used in English — as it often refers to. the whole non-physical consciousness including even the vital with all its desires and passions. That was why the word psychic being has to be used so as to distinguish this divine portion from the instrumental parts of the nature.™
“The soul is a spark of the Divine Spirit which supports the individual nature; mind, life, body are the
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instruments for the manifestation of the nature. In most men the soul is hidden and covered over by the action of the external nature; they mistake the vital being for the soul, because it is the vital which animates and moves the body. But this vital being is a thing made up of desires and executive forces, good and bad; it is the desire-soul, not the true thing. It is when the true soul (psyche) comes forward and begins first to influence and then govern the actions of the instrumental nature that man begins to overcome vital desire and grow towards a divine nature.”
As stated above, the psyche is covered over by the outer nature of mind, life and body. However, the psyche exercises a constant, though indirect, influence on the outer being. There are brief moments or relatively enduring periods in the lives of most of us when we are more strongly under the influence of the psyche. During such moments or periods, we feel a certain state of inner well-being which we may experience differently at different times, as a state of peace, faith, joy, strength, love, aspiration, or simply goodwill towards all. The hallmark of such a state of psychological well-being which results from contact with one’s psyche, as distinguished from an ordinary state of “feeling good”, is that the psychic state of well-being is not dependent on outer conditions, such as favourable circumstances, good health, etc. On the contrary, a state of psychic well-being is often experienced in spite of unfavourable outer conditions.
Such a state of psychological health has been described by the Mother in speaking about the initial state of people
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when they come to live in the Sri Aurobindo Ashram. She says:
“Some of them come with a mental aspiration, either to serve or to learn; others come in the hope of doing yoga, of finding the Divine and uniting with Him; finally there are those who want to devote themselves entirely to the divine work upon earth. All of them come impelled by their psychic being, which wants to lead them towards self-realisation. They come with their psychic in front and ruling their consciousness; they have a psychic contact with people and things. Everything seems beautiful and good to them, their health improves, their consciousness grows more luminous; they feel happy, peaceful and safe; they think that they have reached their utmost possibility of consciousness. This peace and fullness and joy given by the psychic contact they naturally find everywhere, in everything and everybody. It gives an openness towards the true consciousness pervading here and working out everything. So long as the openness is there, the peace, the fullness and the joy remain with their immediate results of progress, health and fitness in the physical, quietness and goodwill in the vital, clear understanding and broadness in the mental and a general feeling of security and satisfaction.”
The above-quoted passage describes what, from the viewpoint of Integral Yoga, would be regarded as a state of “mental health”. Two things may be noted about such a state as described above. First, the state of psychological
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well-being is described in terms of the physical (“health and fitness in the physical”), the vital (“quietness and goodwill in the vital”) and the mental (“clear understanding and broadness in the mental”), as well as an over-all sense of inner well-being (“a general feeling of security and satisfaction”). Secondly, such a state of psychological health is ascribed to the fact that the psychic is in front and rules the consciousness, and gives one “a psychic contact with people and things”.
The quintessence of mental health, from the viewpoint of Integral Yoga, lies in a change of consciousness, from one that is governed primarily by the outer consciousness of the physical, the vital or the mental to one that reflects more and more an inner or a higher consciousness. It is only by such a change of consciousness that one can be freed from psychological disturbances which, as elaborated in the preceding pages, are an inherent part of the ordinary physical, vital and mental consciousness in which we live most of the time. The kind of change of consciousness that is favoured most in Integral Yoga is that of “psychicisation’’, which lies in bringing the mind, the vital and the physical under the domination of the psychic. Such a change can be brought about gradually when the discovery of one’s inmost being becomes more and more the dominating purpose of one’s life. Before one discovers one’s inmost being, one usually. comes in contact with parts of the being which are intermediate between the outer being and the inmost being. Such a contact with these intermediate planes of the being, referred to in Integral Yoga as the subliminal or the inner parts of the being, does liberate one from the disturbances of the outer consciousness. However, it is only by psychicisation
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that one can not only free oneself from the influence of the disturbances but also transform the outer consciousness so as to rid it altogether of all disturbances and establish an immutable state of positive mental health.
This book, compiled from the works of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother, aims at presenting some of the principles and methods of Integral Yoga for overcoming psychological disturbances and for attaining positive mental health. The reader who has been kept in view in selecting the extracts is someone who is open to ideas derived from yoga without necessarily being a practitioner of yoga. Therefore, generally, methods of yoga that would be pertinent only for a practitioner have not been included. However, some of the extracts do allude to methods which pertain to the practice of yoga.
As explained in the preceding pages, Sri Aurobindo’s yoga distinguishes psychological disturbances according to the part or plane of the being to which they belong. Therefore, extracts in this compilation have been classified according to the different parts and planes of being as viewed in Sri Aurobindo’s yoga.
Many methods and principles of Integral Yoga are of a general nature, being applicable to disturbances of any part of the being. Such general methods and principles have been placed in a separate section at the beginning of the book. This section also includes methods and principles for attaining positive well-being, as distinguished from merely overcoming disturbances. The last section, too, entitled “Exercises for Growth and Mastery”, deals with methods for the attainment of positive psychological health.
A. S. Dalal
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