The Challenge of Changing Human Nature

0:01 Those individuals who take up the practice of yoga for the purpose of transformation of the nature and the development of wider and higher states of consciousness inevitably find that the influence of the physical and vital basis upon which human life is based represents one of the greatest, if not actually the greatest, obstacles to their spiritual development. The idea of changing human nature, overcoming the embedded habits, the atavistic tendencies, the ingrained responses bred into human existence for many millennia is one that most people consider to be essentially impossible. If we look, however, at the long trend of evolution, we see that indeed, while many things are deeply embedded, other elements can and do change, evolve, grow and progress. The challenge then, for the practitioner of yoga is how to speed up these changes and support the evolutionary trend in a compressed time period.

1:12 This is clearly not something easy nor instantly successful, but it is something achievable with patience and persistence, along with a scrupulous review of the motive forces that rise up in many cases without our conscious attention and control to continue the habitual patterns of the past, Sri Robindo writes in the Synthesis of Yoga quote. The principle of dark and dull inertia is at it life's basis. All are tied down by the body and its needs and desires to a trivial mind, petty desires and emotions, an insignificant repetition of small worthless functionings, needs, cares, occupations, pains, pleasures that lead to nothing beyond themselves and bear the stamp of an ignorance that knows not its own. Why and wither.

2:13 This physical mind of inertia believes in no divinity other than its small earth gods. It aspires perhaps to a greater comfort, order, pleasure, but asks no uplifting and no spiritual deliverance. At the centre we meet a stronger will of life with a greater gusto, but it is a blinded demon, a perverted spirit, and exults in the very elements that make of life a striving turmoil and an unhappy imbroglio. It is a soul of human or Titanic desire, clinging to the garish colour, disordered poetry, violent tragedy or stirring melodrama of the mixed flux of good and evil, joy and sorrow, light and darkness, heady rapture and bitter torture.

3:08 It loves these things, and would have more and more of them, or even when it suffers and cries out against them, can accept or joy in nothing else. It hates and revolts against higher things, and in its fury would trample, tear, or crucify any diviner power that has the presumption to offer to make life pure, luminous, and happy, and snatch from its lips the fiery brew of that exciting mixture. Another will in life there is that is ready to follow the ameliorating ideal mind, and is allured by its offer to extract some harmony, beauty, light, nobler order out of life.

3:58 But this is a smaller part of the vital nature, and can be easily overpowered by its more violent or darker, duller yoke comrades. Nor does it readily lend itself to a call higher than that of the mind, unless that call defeats itself, as religion usually does, by lowering its demands to conditions more intelligible to our obscure vital nature. All these forces the spiritual seeker grows aware of in himself and finds all around him, and has to struggle and combat incessantly to be rid of their grip and dislodge the long entrenched mastery they have exercised over his own being as over the environ in human existence. The difficulty is great, for their hold is so strong, so apparently invincible, that it justifies the disdainful dictum which compares human nature to a dog's tail. For straighten it never so much by force of ethics, religion, reason, or any other redemptive effort. It returns in the end always to the crooked curl of nature, and so great is the vim, the clutch of that more agitated life will. So immense the peril of its passions and errors, so subtly insistent or persistently

5:31 invasive, so obstinate up to the very gates of heaven, the fury of its attack, or the tedious obstruction of its obstacles, that even the St. and the Yogin cannot be sure of their liberated purity or their trained self mastery against its intrigue or its violence. End Quote. Reference Srioro Bindo and the Mother, Looking from Within, Chapter 1, Looking at Life and Circumstances, pages 17 to 19.