Every Yogic Practitioner Must Develop Along His Own Path and Face His Own Difficulties

We like to have certainty, safety, and fixed map that provides us directions, steps, milestone markers and which will lead us to the goal of our seeking. Spiritual development, however, is not quite the same as an automobile or train trip from one city to another. The complex nexus that is created for each individual implies that everyone starts from a somewhat different psychological place, with different opportunities, different limitations and difficulties, different developed capacities and, indeed, different solutions to attain to somewhat varying results.

With this amount of complexity and variance, it is not feasible to set up one rule that addresses the circumstances of all individuals, and thus, a fixed and detailed step-by-step approach to yoga and spiritual development is not actually possible. Even in the more precise physical Asanas advanced in Hatha Yoga, not everyone can simply follow a fixed routine and achieve the same result. When we look at the psychological aspects of spiritual development, it becomes even less possible to dictate one specific series of actions to achieve one specific planned result.

Sri Aurobindo and the Mother recognised this complexity and thus, refrained from giving out specific and detailed instructions that would apply equally to all. They focused on sadhaks growing in consciousness, gaining ‘situational awareness’ to understand what was occurring in their own development, and applying any number of a variety of methodologies depending on the specific situation within which they found themselves.

This wide variability in the development of the various practitioners of the yoga implied that there would be variances in the timing, manner, type and depth of experiences that would arise for the seeker. For those who are eager for experiences, a delay in their occurrence became a source of anxiety, worry and dissatisfaction and despair in some cases. Sri Aurobindo advises that experiences that come too soon for a seeker can themselves create issues, risks and problems, and thus, an individual who undertook the processes to extirpate the influence of desire and the vital ego from the nature would be able to follow a much safer path of development.

Sri Aurobindo writes: “Experiences come to many before the nature is ready to make full profit from them; to others a more or less prolonged period of purification and preparation of the stuff of the nature or the instruments comes first, while experiences are held up till this process is largely or wholly over. The latter method is the safe and sounder of the two.”

Sri Aurobindo and the Mother, Growing Within: The Psychology of Inner Development, Chapter VII Growth of Consciousness, Inner Experiences, pp. 134-135