The Synthesis of Yoga - Sri Aurobindo Ashram

The Ascent of the Sacrifice – 1 145
it necessary for the seeker to gather together his energies and
focus them only on that which will help the transition and to
leave aside or subordinate for the time all that is not directly
turned towards the one object. He may find that this or that
pursuit of human knowledge with which he was accustomed to
deal by the surface power of the mind still brings him by reason
of this tendency or habit out of the depths to the surface or down
from the heights which he has climbed or is nearing to lower
levels. These activities then may have to be intermitted or put
aside until, secure in a higher consciousness, he is able to turn
its powers on all the mental fields; then, subjected to that light
or taken up into it, they are turned, by the transformation of
his consciousness, into a province of the spiritual and divine. All
that cannot be so transformed or refuses to be part of a divine
consciousness he will abandon without hesitation, but not from
any preconceived prejudgment of its unfitness or its incapacity
to be an element of the new inner life. There can be no fixed
mental test or principle for these things; he will therefore follow
no unalterable rule, but accept or repel an activity of the mind
according to his feeling, insight or experience until the greater
Power and Light are there to turn their unerring scrutiny on all
that is below and choose or reject their material out of what the
human evolution has prepared for the divine labour.
How precisely or by what stages this progression and change
will take place must depend on the form, need and powers of the
individual nature. In the spiritual domain the essence is always
one, but there is yet an infinite variety and, at any rate in the integral
Yoga, the rigidity of a strict and precise mental rule is seldom
applicable; for, even when they walk in the same direction, no
two natures proceed on exactly the same lines, in the same series
of steps or with quite identical stages of their progress. It may yet
be said that a logical succession of the states of progress would
be very much in this order. First, there is a large turning in which
all the natural mental activities proper to the individual nature
are taken up or referred to a higher standpoint and dedicated by
the soul in us, the psychic being, the priest of the sacrifice, to the
divine service; next, there is an attempt at an ascent of the being