The Vital Nature: Transformation Not Suppression

The vital has a natural tendency to seek for the fulfillment of its being in some form of enjoyment. In the external surface being, this enjoyment takes the form of a seeking after pleasure. With this seeking after pleasure, however, comes also the experience of pain. Pleasure and pain alternate and eventually the seeker understands that transitory pleasures and pains, the operation of the dualities of the life of the senses, is not actual fulfillment, nor does it solve the significance of purpose of one’s life.

Many ideas arise as to the best way to solve the issue of fulfillment of the vital without the unfulfilling alternation of the dualities. Many believe that it is not possible to overcome these dualities and they will indicate that any seeking after pleasure necessarily involves the experience of the opposite, pain, and that this is the natural condition of life on earth. In other words, just accept the conditions and don’t complain about it.

There are others who believe that the solution lies in not seeking after pleasure at all, by suppression of the vital impulsions entirely. This approach is particularly attractive to those who are focused on trying to attain the divine status through meditation, concentration, deep spiritual experiences of samadhi, the inward spiritual trance state. This approach however does not solve the issue but simply hides it from the seeker for some period of time. Eventually, the larger purpose of the universal creation and the individual’s role in it needs to be addressed.

The issue comes down to how to maintain the motivation of the vital nature while redirecting its fulfillment away from the seeking of pleasure. This eventually can yield the result of achieving the state of Ananda, bliss, delight of existence, unconditioned by specific causative factors that bring pleasure to the external nature.

The Mother observes: “One must refuse pleasure if one wants to open to the delight of existence, in a total beauty and harmony. … This brings us quite naturally to vital austerity, the austerity of the sensations, the tapasya of power. For the vital being is the seat of power, of effective enthusiasm. It is in the vital that thought is transformed into will and becomes a dynamism for action. It is also true that the vital is the seat of desires and passions, of violent impulses and equally violent reactions, of revolt and depression. The normal remedy is to strangle and starve the vital by depriving it of all sensation; sensations are indeed its main sustenance and without them it falls asleep, grows sluggish and starves to death.”

Sri Aurobindo and the Mother, Our Many Selves: Practical Yogic Psychology, Chapter 2, Planes and Parts of the Being, pp. 28-29