My Integral Yoga for Training the Vital

Let us remind ourselves about Mother’s method for training the vital. It is two-fold:

‘This vital education has two principal aspects, very different in their aims and methods, but both equally important. The first concerns the development and use of the sense organs. The second the progressing awareness and control of the character, culminating in its transformation.’ (CWM 12) 

I’ve mentioned what I do for the training of the senses in part 1 (My Integral Yoga to Develop the Senses, blog post 26 Jan 2023). In this second part, I will share what I do for the development of the character.

Overall, in working with my vital being and its character development, I have a positive attitude based on Mother’s way of educating the vital. She says, 

‘Generally, all disciplines dealing with the vital being, its purification and its control, proceed by coercion, suppression, abstinence, and asceticism. This procedure is certainly easier and quicker, although less deeply enduring and effective, than a rigorous and detailed education. Besides, it eliminates all possibility of the intervention, help and collaboration of the vital. And yet this help is of the utmost importance if one wants the individual’s growth and action to be complete.’ (CWM 12)

She continues with this idea,

‘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. 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.' (CWM 12)

I personally have found this approach with the vital being to be very helpful. Rather than using methods of coercion or strict discipline, I have been more proactive in giving guidance and supportive correction to my vital.

My starting point for character development is based on Mother’s guidance of becoming aware of one’s various movements. She says,

‘To become conscious of the various movements in oneself and be aware of what one does and why one does it, is the indispensable starting point. The child must be taught to observe, to note his reactions and impulses and their causes, to become a discerning witness of his desires, his movements of violence and passion, his instincts of possession and appropriation and domination and the background of vanity which supports them, together with their counterparts of weakness, discouragement, depression, and despair.’ (CWM 12)

To support this practice of becoming aware of what is going on in my emotions, feelings, etc., I use her method of what she has called the ‘psychic mirror’.

‘There is but one remedy: that signpost must always be there, a mirror well placed in one’s feelings, impulses, all one’s sensations. One sees them in this mirror. There are some which are not very beautiful or pleasant to look at; there are others which are beautiful, pleasant, and must be kept. This one does a hundred times a day if necessary.

And it is very interesting. One draws a kind of big circle around the psychic mirror and arranges all the elements around it. If there is something that is not all right, it casts a sort of grey shadow upon the mirror: this element must be shifted, organised. It must be spoken to, made to understand, one must come out of that darkness. If you do that, you never get bored. When people are not kind, when one has a cold in the head, when one doesn’t know one’s lessons, and so on, one begins to look into this mirror. It is very interesting one sees the canker … Not a thing happens in life which is not interesting. This mirror is very, very well made. Do that for two years, three, four years, at times one must do it for twenty years. Then at the end of a few years, look back, turn your gaze upon what you were three years ago: ‘How I have changed!... Was I like that? ...’ It is very entertaining. ‘I could speak like that? I could talk like that, think like that?... But I was indeed stupid! How I have changed!’ It’s very interesting, isn’t it?’ (CWM 5)

This ‘psychic mirror’ practice has been for me the most thorough, direct, and simple way of refining my vital character. It helps me to organise every movement in myself around the psychic aspiration. Let’s say an emotion of anger comes up over some thing or the other. First, I am aware that there is this emotion. Then in the light of my psychic aspiration and clarity, I discern how this is causing a negative vibration in my consciousness. For example, just a few minutes before I might have been feeling great and having what Mother calls ‘psychic balance’, inner equilibrium. Then when this emotion of anger came up due to that incident, that inner poise and balance was lost. Along with the emotion of anger there may be thoughts of anger, etc. So, my inner state has become cloudy and upset compared to how it was a few minutes before.

Then applying this ‘psychic mirror’ practice, I develop the skill to let this emotion be reflected on this mirror, as it were, seen in my consciousness influenced by the psychic, and it stands out as something out of place. Then I do what she says, that ‘it (the vital) must be spoken to, made to understand, one must come out of that darkness.’ So, I may speak to the vital or give it guidance about the anger movement, what caused it, how to manage it, etc. And I take 5 or 10 minutes or longer if needed, and if I have the time to do this, I may repeat this again later that day and the next day if needed. As she has said, ‘This one does a hundred times a day if necessary.’ I probably wouldn’t do this a hundred times in a day, but the fact that she says that much indicates how much importance she gave to this practice. And for us, Mother speaks first-hand about the importance of this type of practice as something she herself did in her own personal development from a very young age. I have included at the end of this essay, her entire talk about how she used this practice when she was young.

And I have found that this has worked very well. With time, and not a long time, I have generally found that wayward emotions and movements like this start to come more under the influence of the inner psychic guidance. So, the parts of the vital that were obstinate or recalcitrant on some type of regressive behaviour, start to change and become more refined. And as a whole my vital becomes more aligned with the inner psychic presence. This has been my main way of uplifting my vital being which then becomes a purer instrument of the Divine work.

With this I conclude with Mother’s words, 

‘To sum up: one must gain a full knowledge of one’s character and then acquire control over one’s movements in order to achieve perfect mastery and the transformation of all the elements that have to be transformed.’ (CWM 12) 

To read further on how Mother uses the psychic mirror as a screen on which we can organise our movements, please read: https://incarnateword.in/cwm/5/29-july-1953, the paragraph beginning with ‘You have never thought about it?’

- Paul Sawh (Canada)

Keywords: Vital, Character, Self-development, Spiritual practice, Self-awareness, Moral education, Vital Education, Overcoming weakness, Refining emotions, Psychic mirror, Self-observation and self-organisation, Integral yoga