Personal Effort Needed in Spiritual Practice and the Action of the Divine Force

0:00 The spiritual seeker starts out from the standpoint of the human individual, the ego consciousness. The process of spiritual development involves A systematic shift of the standpoint to the divine standpoint. This process does not occur overnight and does not proceed automatically, but requires some effort on the part of the individual. Without this effort, the human nature remains essentially unchanged, locked into the ego personality and unable to fully integrate the higher powers of consciousness. In his book The Mother, Sri Aurobindo devotes several chapters to this process, the steps along the way and the needed personal effort, both in terms of what it needs to be and the rationale for such effort. Quote The personal effort required is a triple labor of aspiration, rejection and surrender. In proportion as the surrender and self consecration progress, the sodic becomes conscious of the divine Shakti doing the Sadhna, pouring into him more and more of Herself, founding in him the freedom and perfection of the divine nature. The more this conscious process replaces his own effort, the more rapid and true becomes his progress. But it cannot completely replace the necessity of personal effort until the surrender and

1:31 consecration are pure and complete from top to bottom. Note that a Temasek surrender, refusing to fulfill the conditions and calling on God to do everything and save one all the trouble and struggle is a deception and does not lead to freedom and perfection. He goes on in this same text to outline the nature and detailed steps of the aspiration, the rejection and the surrender. It becomes quickly obvious that as long as one still is based in the ego, there is a need to tune the aspiration to the higher powers, to remove the obstructions and static in the reception of the higher forces into one's being and to then allow those forces to act to transform the mental, vital and physical aspects of the being.

2:28 Sriorabinda writes quote. It is not possible to get rid of the stress on personal effort at once and not always desirable, for personal effort is better than temasek inertia. The personal effort has to be transformed progressively into a movement of the divine force. If you feel conscious of the divine force, then call it in more and more to govern your effort, to take it up, to transform it into something not yours but the Mother's. There will be a sort of transfer, a taking up of the forces at work in the personal Attar, a transfer not suddenly complete but progressive.

3:12 But the psychic poise is necessary, the discrimination must develop which sees accurately what is the divine force, what is the element of personal effort, and what is brought in as a mixture from the lower cosmic forces. And until the transfer is complete, which always takes time, there must always be as a personal contribution, a constant consent to the true Force, a constant rejection of any lower mixture. At present, to give up personal effort is not what is wanted, but to call in more and more of the Divine Power and govern and guide it the personal endeavour.

3:57 End Quote. Reference Sri Aurobindo, Basis of Yoga, Chapter 2. Faith, Aspiration Surrender, pages 28 to 29.