The Cure for the Spiritual Aspirant for Doubt, Guilt, Feelings of Unsuitability and Despair

As long as we base ourselves in the individual personal identity, what we term the ‘ego-consciousness’ we are subject to mistakes, failures, indiscretions, and other situations where we do not meet our own internal concept of what we ‘should’ do. Most of this is based on the background and training we have received in our society, and the expectations that are put upon us by that societal setting.

When an individual takes up the spiritual life, he adds to the embedded background expectations a new set of expectations based on what he interprets (or what he is told) the requirements of the spiritual path he is on to be. In some cases, eventual results are taken to be rules to follow from the outset, even though the seeker is not wholly prepared to do that.

To the extent he remains in the consciousness of the individual ego-personality, this can lead to feelings of unsuitability, doubt, guilt or despair of achieving the desired result. The primary prescription that resolves these feelings is to shift to the divine standpoint and away from the ego-standpoint, to thereby act from the impulsion of the Divine and not be anguished thereby by normal human difficulties, failures or troubles. This is the liberation from the ego-personality that provides the basis for a dedicated, consecrated and still active life in the world. The more the seeker focuses on turning his full attention to the Divine, the less he is bothered by the inevitable weaknesses and failures that are the issues that act as obstacles during the transition from ego-nature to divine-nature. Obsessing over all the impediments of the natural being as developed in the past and present simply creates friction in the process of transitioning to the basis of the next phase of consciousness that is manifesting through the seekers who open to its capabilities.

Sri Aurobindo notes: “You ask how you can repair the wrong you seem to have done. Admitting that is is as you say, it seems to me that the reparation lies precisely in this, in making yourself a vessel for the Divine Truth and the Divine Love. And the first steps towards that are a complete self-consecration and self-purification, a complete opening of oneself to the Divine, rejecting all in oneself that can stand in the way of the fulfilment. In the spiritual life there is no other reparation for any mistake, none that is wholly effective. At the beginning one should not ask for any other fruit or results than this internal growth and change, — for othewise one lays oneself open to severe disappointments. Only when one is free, can one free others and in Yoga it is out of the inner victory that there comes the outer conquest.”

Sri Aurobindo, Bases of Yoga, Chapter 2, Faith — Aspiration — Surrender, pp. 27-28