The Education and Uplifting of the Vital Nature

One of the most confusing issues for the spiritual seeker is the ‘care and feeding’ of the vital nature. We shift from one extreme to the other in our view of how to bring it under control, for it is virtually uniformly recognised that for spiritual development, the vital nature must be controlled. We may choose to try to suppress the vital nature, to prevent its natural predilections from expressing themselves. In such a case we tend to struggle with the impulses, urges, demands of the vital forces that surge within us. Some resort to an attempt to use violence to bring the vital nature under control, through self-torture, through bouts of straining against indulgence, through depression when we fail in that attempt. Others hold that by satiating the vital nature we can eventually bring it to a state of quiescence where it feels fulfilled and no longer requires further satisfaction; this however is soon found to be an idle belief and we find, instead, that the more we try to indulge the vital, the more insistent and powerful its demands become. Some propose a “middle path” but without appropriate guidance, the middle path simply represents a compromise that does not actually solve the issue we are facing.

The Mother provides insight into the idea that the vital can and should be made a willing participant and collaborator in the spiritual seeking. The vital needs to be refined, educated and uplifted, not suppressed or indulged.

Just as when we eat food to nourish the physical body, we soon learn that certain foods can harm that health, while other support the vibrant strength and health of the body, so also the food of the vital being needs to be properly understood and selected. The vital feeds on vibrations, on impressions, on feelings. Those that aggravate and create turbulent energies in the being are counter-productive to the spiritual seeking. Those that refine, subtilise and uplift the being, are supportive to the spiritual quest and thus can be cultivated and supported.

The Mother writes: “Thus, if we do not wish to starve our vital, sensations must not be rejected or diminished in number and intensity. Neither should we avoid them; rather we must make use of them with wisdom and discernment. Sensations are an excellent instrument of knowledge and education, but to make them serve these ends, they must not be used egotistically for the sake of enjoyment, in a blind and ignorant search for pleasure and self-satisfaction.”

“The senses should be capable of enduring everything without disgust or displeasure, but at the same time they must acquire and develop the power of discerning the quality, origin and effect of the various vital vibrations in order to know whether they are favourable to harmony, beauty and good health or whether they are harmful to the balance and progress of the physical being and the vital. Moreover, the senses should be used as instruments to approach and study the physical and vital worlds in all their complexity; in this way they will take their true place in the great endeavour towards transformation.”

“It is by enlightening, strengthening and purifying the vital, and not by weakening it, that one can contribute to the true progress of the being. To deprive oneself of sensations is therefore as harmful as depriving oneself of food. But just as the choice of food must be made wisely and solely for the growth and proper functioning of the body, so too the choice of sensations and their control should be made with a very scientific austerity and solely for the growth and perfection of the vital, of this highly dynamic instrument, which is as essential for progress as all the other parts of the being.”

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“It is by educating the vital, by making it more refined, more sensitive, more subtle and, one should almost say, more elegant, in the best sense of the word, that one can overcome its violence and brutality, which are in fact a form of crudity and ignorance, of lack of taste.”

“In truth, a cultivated and illumined vital can be as noble and heroic and disinterested as it is now spontaneously vulgar, egoistic and perverted when it is left to itself without education. It is enough for each one to know how to transform in himself the search for pleasure into an aspiration for the supramental plenitude. If the education of the vital is carried far enough, with perseverance and sincerity, there comes a time when, convinced of the greatness and beauty of the goal, the vital gives up petty and illusory sensorial satisfactions in order to win the divine delight.”

Sri Aurobindo and the Mother, Our Many Selves: Practical Yogic Psychology, Chapter 2, Planes and Parts of the Being, pp. 29-31