Distinguishing Vital or Mental Desire or Demand from Aspiration of the Psychic Being

Desire can take many forms, some of them subtle, inasmuch as they are linked to prayer and thus seem to confirm the aspiration. There is a subtle form of bargaining that can take place where the dedication of the seeker is tied to the Divine providing a specific anticipated form of realisation, support or result. In some cases this is couched in such a way as to make it seem that the bargaining is so that the individual can better carry out the Divine Will, as the individual understands it. This is a form of desire that stems from the mental or vital part of the nature, not directly from the soul or psychic being.

If we look carefully at the form that the aspiration or prayer takes, it is actually not too difficult to distinguish those that either originate in the mental or vital being, or which are at least influenced and colored by them. The psychic formation of aspiration is pure, undemanding, quiet and receptive and ready to give itself to the Divine without preconditions.

This implies that the seeker also does not have expectation about a particular form, type or time for a result to be given. The Divine acts according to his own light and his own time and the psychic being accepts that without impatience, disturbance or any loss of faith.

Sri Aurobindo notes: "Demand and desire are only two different aspects of the same thing -- nor is it necessary that a feeling should be agitated or restless to be a desire; it can be, on the contrary, quietly fixed and persistent or persistently recurrent. Demand or desire comes from the mental or the vital, but a psychic or spiritual need is a different thing. The psychic does not demand or desire -- it aspires; it does not make conditions for its surrender or withdraw if its aspiration is not immediately satisfied -- for the psychic has complete trust in the Divine or in the Guru and can wait for the right time or the hour of the Divine Grace. The psychic has an insistence of its own, but it puts its pressure not on the Divine, but on the nature, placing a finger of light on all the defects there that stand in the way of the realisation, sifting out all that is mixed, ignorant or imperfect in the experience or in the movements of the Yoga and never satisfied with itself or with the nature till it has got it perfectly open to the Divine, free from all forms of ego, surrendered, simple and right in the attitude and all the movements. This is what has to be established entirely in the mind and vital and in the physical consciousness before supramentalisation of the whole nature is possible. Otherwise what one gets is more or less brilliant, half-luminous, half-cloudy illuminations and experiences on the mental and vital and physical planes inspired either from some larger mind or larger vital or at the best from the mental reaches above the human that intervene between the intellect and the Overmind. These can be very stimulating and satisfying up to a certain point and are good for those who want some spiritual realisation on these planes; but the supramental realisation is something much more difficult and exacting in its conditions and the most difficult of all is to bring it down to the physical level."

Sri Aurobindo, Bases of Yoga, Chapter 4, Desire -- Food -- Sex, pp. 62-63