EWS #45: Questions and answers (2)
Sept 21, 2019
Topics:
Narad (0:00:40):
Namaste. Welcome to our continuing series, Evenings with Sraddhalu. Namaste Sraddhalu. I wanted to cover a couple of points today. One is again that these evenings are going to be translated into Russian by our dear friend Nadejda, and she's already begun. The second is as you heard in our last session with Saurav asking some questions. Please feel free to write to me, narada12 at gmail.com, with any questions and I will see that Sraddhalu can address them.
Sraddhalu (0:01:34):
I thought to continue from the last question where we spoke about health and healing and we looked at the key point that all illness is really some kind of disharmony. And the disharmony can be in the physical body, it can be internal to the body, it can be between body and environment, it can be in the vital body, it can be in the mental body, it can be even disharmony in relation from the personality to the psychic being or it can be in relation to the spiritual consciousness. It can also be a disharmony between bodies and this is an aspect which people don't always recognize and I want to touch upon some of these ideas. We also saw there is the key is ultimately faith but in its deepest spiritual sense as an experiential knowledge which the body has to have in order to be able to heal itself. If it remembers and knows what it's like to be well, it can bring forward that knowledge and bring back the harmony. And this can go very far. It can heal and even have miraculous interventions. A gradual healing is of course possible, but when there is a spiritual imprint which brings back the harmony, one can have miraculous overnight cures. And all of this was part of our discussion last time.
But more than just healing from illness, for the purpose of the integral yoga, we need to have a strong, healthy instrument. First strong because if you are to manifest the Divine consciousness, eventually in its fullness, then you cannot be a little cup into which the ocean so that the ocean can manifest through you. And so the physical body itself has to be strong. And it means not only physical muscular strength, which is one aspect of the strength and it doesn't mean everyone has to have muscles, but it means also resilience. It means also immunity to falling ill, but most of all, it means that the nerves and the internal constitution of the body is strong enough that it can bear the intensity of the spiritual force. So this is something which I had alluded to last time when I spoke of disharmony with the spiritual, but I had not elaborated. It often happens, especially in the context of the yoga, that when there is a strong action of the spiritual force, the physical body can only contain so much. After that it starts getting destabilised, it cannot hold. And so the spiritual force itself naturally restrains itself. But if we are to become effective instruments for the Divine in its fullness, then we have to be able to bear and contain whatever intensity is needed to pour through us. And so it becomes a critical element of our spiritual life to make the body strong and resilient.
Sraddhalu (0:05:12):
Sri Aurobindo, in a very interesting conversation, I think it was with the Duraiswami Iyer, but I may be wrong, but one of those very early disciples in the 30s, he points to the disciple, he points to his body and says that, 'your nerves are still weak, you must make them strong', and then he says, 'my nerves also were weak and I made them strong by yoga' and then he explains the method is to bring peace into the nerves and people think of it as more like a poetic imagery. it's not an imagery, it is a fact of experience that peace is experienced as a substance, it has a substantiality of it. It exists as a power of the Self and can be experienced generally above you and it must come down and settle into the body and settle into the nerves, into the very tissue and substance of the body and to the extent that it can settle, it actually transmutes the working of the body. I am not speaking of substance yet, but the working it transmutes, and very quickly and as a result of this descent your body can become extremely strong and resilient starting with the nerves which are the most receptive, the most conscious part and then eventually through all the tissue of the body. And you may start with a weak body and grow to become a strong and resilient and healthy body. And this can be assisted by an external process which from a purely yogic perspective will be to make the body conscious and more receptive. And for that you can use asanas, you can use aerobic type of exercises, you can even take exercises of the gym. It's not the exercise you do which matters, it's the way you do it which will matter. And your intention must be to make the body conscious, to make the body receptive and if possible turn the body awareness in relation to the Divine and deepen that contact with the Divine consciousness or Spiritual force, Mother's force. If you don't have that aspect, at least the intention to do that, to make the body conscious and infuse in it with your mind and heart, something of your aspiration to receive Mother's force. But if done in that way, it does not matter what you do, but that you do it in a manner that is thorough enough that every single limb and every muscle and tissue and fibre of your body is somehow taken into the ambit of this increased awareness. It could start with a simple exercise, you're conscious of your hands and your arms and you concentrate to intensify that awareness and awaken in that awareness and aspiration and if you can infuse and receive the peace settling in it. And this exercise would be done sitting without moving in any way, it would still have the same result. You could do it moving as a stretch while doing asanas, as you reach out to stretch your arms or bend in a particular way. For most people this is much easier because it immediately triggers sensations in parts of the muscles and while the sensation is there, you can infuse this awareness or this aspiration or bring peace into that part and change that. Or some people find that too passive, too slow, they need to be doing something more active, so you go cycling, jogging or swimming. But there again, you have to consciously infuse. While swimming of course you can't infuse on a part, a limb, but you can work on the whole body. And afterwards you can sit and lie down and receive part by part in different parts of your body. There are many ways one could do. Mother even says you could do the simple exercise, while climbing stairs, instead of climbing mechanically with your mind wandering, you consciously climb and place each step consciously, feeling the muscles and awakening and intensifying the awareness, and you would have a benefit. It would be an exercise. So for the purpose of the integral yoga, whatever the particular form of exercise, if you can do it with this intention, you will be building a strong physical base.
Second, you have to build a strong base of the vital body and just as we have a physical body, the vital body is also a body and it needs to be strengthened, and the best way of course is again infusing peace into it but for the vital that's not enough that's the first step. It has to also widen, it has to become vast. The physical body can't widen but its consciousness can widen but the vital body can actually become larger as a result of this increased and widened awareness, and the similar thing for the mind. The training for all three though has one common component which is essential in what Sri Aurobindo calls purification, in the integral yoga.
Sraddhalu (0:10:06):
Purification, Sri Aurobindo describes in two, as two functions. First, to be able to bring stillness by removing agitation and the other is to separate mixture of other parts into this. That's how you purify a part. So the first part of it is bringing complete stillness which is again done either by bringing peace directly or training the part to become quiet and still without needing to get restless. So that you could do that through asanas with your body, you could do it similarly in the vital to be able to sit in a quiet concentration without the vital getting restless or needing to excite itself by some other activity and you could do it in your mind to hold the mind in a state of stillness even silence eventually and then in the mind similarly a widening to make it plastic and vast. If into this there is a descent of the consciousness from above, the descending consciousness is vast, it's the ocean, it's infinite, it will make your mind wide, it will make your vital wide, it will make your body consciousness wide. And that's when you have a base which is strong enough to receive the infinite. In particular, the integral yoga is also a supramental yoga or as at least has the stage of the supramental yoga and for the supramental we cannot even talk about the supramental without first recognizing that it is a consciousness of infinity and so unless your consciousness is able to enter in relation with the infinite and open to the infinite there is no question of anything happening with regard to the supramental. And if that is our goal and it is our stated goal, then well this is a preparation for it. But developing these three is not enough. We have also to harmonise and integrate, so you have a great vitality but the physical body is unable to contain the vitality, you have a great power of mind but your ability to act physically is weakened because of physical limitations. So this is one example of a person in our ashram, an extraordinary person, don't know if I should name him, he was a doctor, he has written many books, beautiful compilations. To him, Mother said, ‘I could have done so much more work through you, if you had a stronger vital’. She wanted to do the work, he had, as an instrument he is extraordinary, but the vital and the nervous component in the physical had certain weaknesses, so she cannot pour all her energies and possibilities, but what she can do she has done as far as his system could take it.
So keeping this as a reference, we have to learn to be able to now not only develop each of these three bodies, bring them to a state of stillness, aspiration and receptivity, but also harmonise them. That means the vital energy should be able to pour through the physical, the physical body and the vital should be able to accept the consciousness of the mind and the direction the mind sets and all of this eventually should orient itself, form itself around the central aspiration of the psychic being. You may not be conscious of the psychic being, but you can become conscious of its aspiration. And all of us can be conscious of that by recognizing the part within us where we love the Divine Mother, the part in us which feels spontaneously this closeness and intimacy with her, the part within us deep within which knows that we belong to her and that we are her children. That we all have, otherwise we wouldn't be here. To become conscious of that is to become conscious of the aspiration glowing out from your psychic being. You may not know the psychic being yet, It is deep but through many layers it reflects into your heart, in your emotions, in your devotion, in your mind and eventually should reflect even in your actions that you can do, the work in service to the Mother. Everything you do and it doesn't matter if you're working in a conventional office doing a job which you don't like, you can still bring into it that sense of doing this to serve her and it will change everything. So all these three parts have to be united, strengthened, widened, harmonised and then organised around the centre which is the aspiration of the psychic being to whatever extent in whatever form you are able to feel it. By dwelling on it you will find bit by bit you will begin to deepen and approach the source of the aspiration and at some point one day you will feel that aspiration and the source of it so vividly that you will have the experience, the direct contact with the psychic presence and even then it may take a long while before the whole of your nature will orient around it and that's fine. The fact that your mind or some part of your devotion has that as a reference is enough that you can begin bit by bit to organise all your activities and these three bodies and your life in these three domains around that centre. And so this is the task given to us and I'm taking this as a continuation of our earlier discussion on health and illness because this is true health.
We think of health only when our physical body falls sick. But the fact is, all human beings are sick because we are fundamentally disharmonious. We have three different pieces and then the psychic centre within, all disconnected. That's ill health. And so inevitably it reflects in a physical sickness of some form or other. And if not sickness, we don't call it sickness, we call it limitation. Somebody can be very healthy physically but so rigid and narrow that well you cannot interact or work with the person at all. To me that's still a psychological sickness. It's an inability, a limitation. It's as if your muscles become hard and you can't move. Your mind becomes narrow and rigid, your mind is not flexible. It's equivalent to your body being stiff, isn't it? And inevitably of course it reflects in the body, if your mind is narrow and rigid your body becomes narrow and rigid. So I'm looking at that for taking from that discussion, we must grow more and more in completeness of harmony within each body, between these three bodies and around the centre of harmony which is the psychic being. And all of this now becomes the vessel, the container which turns and opens to the spiritual consciousness, the Divine presence, the vast presence of the Mother and becomes a receptacle for her force and for her action to work through us. And this is when we can say, now you are healthy and you are an instrument.
Narad (0:17:09):
Mother has given us many flowers, ‘peace in the nerves’, ‘peace in the physical’, ‘peace in the vital’, to help us through the flowers to attain this. I wanted to ask you about something we haven't touched on, and that is possession. And ofcourse, in the Catholic religion, exorcism. How, when an adverse force comes into the being, does the person get rid of it when it's so strong?
Sraddhalu (0:17:51):
I will broaden the question to a more subtle form of possession, of which we are not conscious at all. As we are dysfunctional individuals, profoundly sick in a certain way, although physically healthy. All kinds of influences act in us from outside, including not so good influences, even anti-divine forces. If they get a hole to poke through, well, they will poke their suggestion, their idea into you and sometimes they seize you. It's strange to see little children who are very nice sometimes they get seized by the excitement of the moment and they start doing something which is perverse and they can't control themselves and push it through and often leading to some harmful consequence. And I've seen that happen, I've experienced it in childhood. If someone says something and you feel overwhelmed by anger and then you wonder where did this come from. And if you're sensitive, the child is surprised and next time stops it from happening. But all of us are vulnerable to these kinds of nudges, pushes suggestions. You can see it happening in children and if you are conscious you can block it, if you are not conscious or if you accept it and enjoy it, then you create a passage where now it starts working. That's your first step towards possession. What is meant by the word possession is that something other than your psychic being now begins to have an influence over you and begins to possess, control a part of you. It starts with that. It can start with a tiny part. So somebody gets upset and the high of the anger seizes him and he begins to enjoy it. If he is in a position of power, there are no consequences because everybody else bears the consequence of his anger, he has to face nothing. So now he begins to enjoy that, begins to trample on others and very quickly before he realises it, he has become a bit of a tyrant. And you see the same fellow before he came to the position of power was such a nice and caring fellow, what happened to him? Power corrupted him. What was the power that corrupted? It's not so much the power but forces which entered and seized his enjoyment of power.
Similarly, they say money corrupts. No, it's not money. It's your allowing yourself to be seized by the enjoyment of it that makes you vulnerable to another force. You can enjoy it, you can enjoy power, but when you allow yourself to be enjoyed by the power, then you have yielded to it. So, this is how it starts in small touches, except in a few rare cases where there is a defect in the system and then you can have these occasional intrusions from other beings, but let's look at a normal case first and then we will look at those extremes. By opening yourself to that and allowing that kind of thing to get in, a partial limited possession has taken place and that is enough to begin to corrupt your life and you may have a strong spiritual aspiration but when it comes to that state or that activity or that situation you find yourself pulled and behaving in an odd way. So the first requirement here is to be utterly sincere, which means integrated. So the problem with the word sincere, 'you should be sincere', I don't know what that means. So Mother places it differently, to integrate all the parts of you or another way she defines is to put all of you in relation to your highest. So if any part is out of sync with your highest or not part of the integration, that is insincerity. So this part which is now under the influence of another or which enjoys that perverse form, well that's your possession. If you're sincere to some degree, you'll recognize this is not acceptable, this is out of sync with my centre or with my highest and you will take steps to correct and prevent it from getting worse. If you don't, then bit by bit that begins to creep in. So that's why you will find in Sri Aurobindo's letters relating to things like people going mad or getting possessed and those extreme forms of psychiatric illness, he says always the root of it is in some form of ambition or desire which is conflicting your centre, which is conflicting with the psychic. Now in this context you'll understand how that makes sense, that ambition or that desire which was corrupting or which allowed something else to seize you was out of sync with your psychic centre, and that's where the possession begins. Once that becomes strong enough and the hold there is so strong that you cannot evict it anymore, it begins a collision. The psychic aspiration and this violence of the vital force, which will win in influencing the surface part of your personality. Finally, that's where the game is taking place. So you can say inside the psychic is awake, but externally it's covered up by this other influence.
Narad (0:23:14):
Even in young children?
Sraddhalu (0:23:16):
It's happening more and more. Especially because of, we have discussed earlier, corrupting influences of music and society. Some of them when they take to alcohol or drugs, it's a moment when they are utterly vulnerable. So, when you are under influence of drugs, your vital being has been exposed to the vital world. And if you do not have a strong enough vital, these forces can say, ah, here's a useful instrument and they hook themselves into you. The experience and the image will be like a leech. If you're walking through the jungle and a leech attaches itself to your body, you can come out, you will feel nothing, but it's draining your blood. If you try to pull it, you can't. It's literally attached itself so tightly, it'll tear off the flesh. Something like that happens in the vital body. They hook into you and then won't let go. Now what happens subsequently? The fellow is completely normal except occasionally he feels this weird tendencies, weird impulses and if he is able to consciously push them out, then you have mitigated, limited and eventually either that leeching energy says, 'ah this is not interesting it lets go' and goes away or it pushes harder, 'I want this instrument', and if at that point the integrity, the sincerity is not strong enough or the psychic influence is not strong enough, it can be pushed back and the other thing takes over I've seen this in people where there's a clear division in personality and some of them were very respected people connected with the ashram, they would put forward this love and devotion for the Mother as a mask. And once they had your trust, this other side would creep out and start manipulating, using, etc. And I couldn't understand how this came until I recognized that the person and we saw the pattern, had always this ambition and strong personal desire to be famous or to assert themselves in some way, get into authority, power and that created the division, the split. I don't think in that in the case I'm thinking of there was an external possession, but the vital nature and its ambition used its spiritual and more psychicized aspect as a cover, but there was a split and the result was in his body you could see, there was one part where you could see the beauty of what he had and in the lower part you could see something warped and inevitably it reflects in the outer form also, the division in consciousness, you could see there were two different people. But all this I am showing, I'm bringing forward to set the base for this more extreme case where now the influence gets strong enough that it can actually cover up the psychic influence and hold that position and the psychic finds itself trapped. It can ask for help and it may come through knocks from outside which break the outer shell and allow the psychic influence to come forward. That will be a painful crisis which breaks the personality, crushes the personality in a way, at least the warped part, in order for something deeper to come forward. Or if the warping is not too strong, the crisis would be enough that the person suddenly says, what am I doing with my life? I want something more meaningful. And it is subjugated by the psychic and the ambition now becomes a skill of power in action used by the psychic and so on. But in the extreme cases where a vital being now gets a hook and takes charge, the psychic being recedes or is completely covered up and that's when we call it a possession. Often in the initial stages of possession there's a reaction because there's a struggle pushing out. In the body there's a reaction, the body feels in the psychiatric vocabulary they call it aura. The person feels like a heat or a presence approaching and they already know it's going to happen and then the body reacts and you have these fits. The body shakes as if trying to throw off and Sri Aurobindo describes that as an attempted possession. Something from outside is trying to get hold of your nervous system, body is repelling and it creates the fits and eventually they stop and it passes. But it generally points to a weakness in the nervous system or in the vital and it can be either hereditary or it can be that the the body is driven to extreme exhaustion by lack, insufficient food or excessive work and which leads to some breakdown and you have had nervous breakdown of some kind and then you're vulnerable and so on. But if you maintain your basic health then that should not happen. But the possession having happened, the psychic has no recourse, it may remain trapped and the personality can be completely seized. In rare cases it even happens that the psychic being leaves the body and it's only the vital being that takes over and the psychic has left long ago.
Narad (0:28:36):
Can it also not be that the person, personality, welcomes this power?
Sraddhalu (0:28:44):
Exactly. Initially there is always this element where someone enjoys it. They enjoy the high, they accept it and that's how they allow it to come in. And once you have allowed it, then it won't let you go. It's got its hook like a leech, it won't let you go, even if you try. So, just as an example of a case, with a child, it's a child who had this thing. The first requirement is for the person to recognize, I don't want this. If that is there, the rest is possible. But if that is not there, it's very difficult. That's why this indulgence of enjoying the high of power or the attention you get from people, then there's no way out. So once the person says, I don't want it, and even though you know that you will no more have the attention and importance, that's fine. Then the pushing out can happen. Then you catch the moment when you begin to feel the aura, and at that point you refuse, not only by will, but you centre yourself around your central aspiration and if necessary call for help, even if needed with the physical prayer, so you may use a prayer such as a mantra of protection like the Mahamrityunjaya mantra, which is In translation it means the great mantra of liberation over death. It's an invocation to Shiva or you can use the Gayatri mantra. All of these are means, an invocation you centre yourself and refuse and push back. So the force may come and it finds itself unable to get in, may try a few times, eventually it says it's not worth it, I'll find someone else and it goes away. If it's been long enough, it'll try again after a while. Well, is this fellow now ready? Is this vulnerable? So you have to be persistent. Sri Aurobindo says that once the symptoms of the fits have stopped, what's the correct term technically for fits? The medical term is epileptic fits. Once the symptoms have been stopped you have to allow for seven years to pass for the body to be completely free of it. If at any point in between it returns even once then you start counting seven years from that point. Here he is actually aligning perfectly with the Ayurvedic tradition that says that any rhythm or habit in the physical consciousness is completely replaced every seven years, every atom and cell of the body is completely replaced. So anything which has been pushed out for seven years is now effectively inaccessible to the body, but if at any point it is half gone out and it comes back, well you start over it again, but in this way he says you can completely cure yourself of this possession attempted or otherwise. In the extreme case of complete possession one can do nothing except if there is a spiritual intervention which is what you were pointing to. Many religious systems have mechanisms, rituals for expelling, the people who expel need to have a certain physical and vital force and strength of their own and of course a spiritual backing but even if they are not spiritually developed a strong vital force may be enough because finally the entity is vital. So I'll give you an example. This is a documented case of somebody, I believe it was England but it's something I read 25 years ago, so memory fades now, of a person who was possessed. In a state of possession he would spew out abusive words, very crude, coarse and then it would pass. So a Christian priest was called to exorcise. The priest starts his exorcism, the person gets into an intense abusive mode and at some point he stops the abuse and he falls down now freed, but the being jumped into the exercising priest and now the priest started his abuses. It is a powerful being. So now they called a higher level priest. So they went up the hierarchy of the church. The higher level priest comes and tries to exercise this priest and the being jumped into that higher level priest. It's a very interesting case, well documented, but it shows that the exercising person must have some, first of all, physical and vital strength, because you are fighting something on that level, but must have a deep enough spiritual foundation if you are dealing with those extreme cases. In India, we have a lot of this kind of knowledge within the tantric system, and there are people who have the ability to do these and often they resort to rituals where the strength is in the ritual and not so much in the person, but the person still has to have a strong vital because and as is the case you do not get into that kind of practice if you don't have a strong vital, but the spiritual component is called by the ritual structure and these can be quite effective but after all that what does the person want? So we come to examples known to us, connected with the ashram, where many cases where people were possessed. When Mother was informed, she intervened and removed the possession. She didn't even need to meet, no ritual, nothing. The name was given, she concentrated and removed the being and the person was free and after a few days or weeks suddenly the person had the symptoms all over again so when they reported to the Mother. Mother said, 'what can I do, I remove the being but the person calls him back because he feels empty, he doesn't feel that high of the vital whatever seizing him, he calls him back' and that's why ultimately we will come back to what do you want. Now having had all this discussion, I want to give to it a positive direction if an external vital being can enter and seize you, well you can equally refuse it and open yourself to the divine energy. And unlike the vital being who is another egocentric vital force as good or as bad as any other human, the Divine energy that fills you is not an egocentric force and it is essentially a force of universality, of compassion, of love, of wisdom, of purity serving the Divine will which includes the whole cosmos in itself. And so we will not use the word possession anymore because now that word has a very narrow connotation, rather we will say to be seized by the Divine consciousness or rather to become a conscious instrument for the Divine. If you can be seized by a hostile or a negative vital being in a possession, you can equally choose to consciously align yourself to the Divine energy and the Divine will and that is the journey of the yoga. For which purpose of course, we first strengthen our individuality so that we are not vulnerable to these external mixtures and then we align ourselves in our entirety to the Divine but also in exclusivity to the Divine, only the Divine and nothing else.
Sraddhalu (0:36:31):
So coming back to the first part of the discussion where I said all of us are vulnerable to influences, 90% of our thoughts or more are coming from outside, 90% of the impulses we have are coming from outside. The error is to think that it's ours. Just because it popped up inside you, you say, my idea, my desire, my impulse. And in so doing, you have been deceived by the force coming from outside. I find this very common among people who will say, I have these persistent negative thoughts. So we go deeper into the discussion and the person says, this thought comes which is always criticizing. I said, 'but you don't want it to come right'? you say, 'yes'. You want it to go away, right? you say, 'yes'. Why doesn't it go away? 'I don't know but I keep thinking', then I said 'recognize, it's not you. You want to not think. How can you say you keep thinking'. And people stop and say, 'ah yes', and I said 'recognize, you want to stop this thinking but that wants to continue, that is not you'. So the first step is recognize that the persistent negative thought pattern is not your thought, it's an outside thought coming in. Sometimes backed by mischievous being, sometimes just a habitual formation and sometimes they take pleasure in harassing you. I say, 'don't you feel harassed by these thoughts?', 'Yes, I'm miserable'. So many people I have met who have this problem, but then at least recognize it's not yours and that being has great joy in harassing you and making you miserable and one is to accept that the next step is separating, 'this is not me'. What do you do if a dog pokes his head inside the window and keeps barking at you 24 hours? Well, you close the window, you do that to this thought formation. And the error of course people make is to push it, push it and it stops here. You have to push it out of your circum-conscience, your entire aura space, your personal space. Literally throw it out far away. If you like, you visualise it as something pushed out until it goes into the sea. You know the sea is like infinity. Dissolve it into the sea, throw it out and you'll feel relief immediately when you do this. You don't just push it out, you take it all the way out and dissolve. Mother gives another form of dealing with this, a persistent thought, she said, you write it out. So what you do is now this energy is fixed to a physical paper and then with a very clear intention you tear it up or burn it. So what you've done is by linking it, you've broken it and dissolved its force and formation. It's actually a form of ritual magic. But you see the principle behind is really one of your will but using a physical representation. First you dissociate, refuse to identify it or accept it as yours. There already half the battle is won. After that it's a question of expelling it and breaking the habit. But the mistake people make is to accept it as my thought, my will, my impulse, my desire. How often have you paused to think, 'is it really my desire?'. And people say, 'I am struggling with my desire for X'. But what do you want? I want this, I don't want that. Then the desire is not yours. So recognizing which is you, placing that at the centre and these peripheral pulls and pushes are from outside and you rather than fighting it as yours and having two parts of you fighting each other you push it out, refuse it, refuse to accept it as yours and the whole play changes so in the first step recognize 90% plus of your thoughts and impulses and desires are from outside they come into you by habit, we've grown up with that or they find a resonance in you, which resonance you can change, but that's not the problem. You can refuse to accept from outside, you can say, 'it's not mine, it's not me', what do I want? and do what you want freely, joyously and then as you become conscious of the thing entering or the things entering, you'll be able to block them out and refuse them well before they enter, but at the same time you have to work on the positive side, you can't just fight on purifying purifying which is an unending. Sri Aurobindo gives this example, you can go on purifying your vital, it'll keep getting sullied because it's open to the universe. So instead, you strengthen the influence of the Divine consciousness, strengthen the glow of your aspiration to fill you, and as that spreads those things have no place that they don't find resonance, they can't come in. So let's say an anger impulse coming from outside can seize you when within you there's a tendency for anger that it can catch and resonate with and by the spreading of this clarity of your aspiration and the Divine influence that knot of anger tendency dissolves. Now the anger force comes, it can't find a resonant point, it passes right through you. You can actually feel, 'ah yes, the anger thing came and I watched it go because nothing in me responded to it' and such a relief to be free, but doesn't mean you're unconscious of it. You see, 'ah yes, all these thoughts are there, okay, but they're not mine' and then it doesn't matter anymore. So work rather on strengthening the core of your aspiration, purity, what you want, what you are, let that grow and fill and those things get pushed out and if you do not fall into the trap of a strong ambition or strong desire then you will easily evade those possessive tendencies which have a strong vital push. It does not mean you don't have an ambition. That's a problem people have in suppressing their ambition, they end up suppressing their drive of action. So your ambition can broaden, become more selfless, to do beautiful things, to do good things, to be of service, to grow in capacity, all of these can be part even of your career path and you can grow in hierarchy, if that is the intention, but always think in terms of the good that you can do and not the seizing of power and the high of the power seizing, which is the warping element, which we will call the perverse ambition.
Sraddhalu (0:43:01):
And even if you have a strong vital, which is I want to serve the Divine and it takes a form which is very personal, okay, but at least you make it large enough that it's no more serving me primarily and I feel good about serving and doing good for others, fine, it's okay, don't fight it too much, rather turn it and widen it. I think broadly this takes up that theme. Today, unfortunately a lot of young children in teenage, I find having problems which come from vital intrusions and inevitably it traces back to one of three things, either exposure to alcohol or exposure to drugs or strong sexual engagements. It need not mean that they have had a relation but they have strong visualisations or watching pornography or things like that which also open you and make you vulnerable in a similar way. All three things were not so common if you barely go back 20 years at least in India. For the US maybe you have to go back 40 years or something but still they were not there before and with these things have come these vital intrusions and I will use the word, partial influences, attempting possession which somehow disrupt the personality. I had recently a very interesting conversation with a young man in his late teens and he had passed through an experience of feeling strong attraction for a girl and then he was able to pull out of it and I explained to him what happens, how it works and it made a lot of sense and then after a few months when I met him again he said you know I find many of my friends getting into that sort of thing, but I decided when I felt, I felt it was wrong. I felt it was premature. I felt I needed to wait. I said perfect. And that was the psychic intimation, giving him the right suggestion. And I explained to him, I said, your system is in the formation of individuality. And when the vital individuality and mental individuality are still not complete, it's easy to feel these pulls and attractions. If you succumb to them, it breaks the formation of individuality and for the rest of your life you'll always have some flaw and some kind of insecurity. But if you can wait, if you can allow the completion of the individuality, let's say as a reference age 21, get to there and you'll feel pulls and pushes, but it's not such a big thing, get to that point, complete your individuality and then you can engage in healthy relationships. You will not have that problem, you will always have a strong sense of security and self-confidence. And so a lot of the problems which you see among young people is because they are being encouraged to have these casual sexual relations prematurely, the formation of individuality not being completed, they end up with insecure personalities for much of their life thereafter. And these things need to be said, these things need to be explained for this purpose.
[Narad] Thank you, so much.
[Sraddhalu] Thank you.