Aspiration & Rejection

From Aspiration - Yoga in Everyday Life Booklet Series (Sri Aurobindo Ashram Trust)
Excerpts from Sri Aurobindo.
''There are two powers that alone can effect in their conjunction the great difficult
thing which is the aim of our endeavour, a fixed and unfailing aspiration that calls from below and a supreme Grace from above that answers...

There must be a total and sincere surrender; there must be an exclusive self-opening to the divine Power; there must be a constant and integral rejection of the falsehood of the mental, vital and physical Powers and Appearances that still rule the earth-nature...

If behind your devotion and surrender you make a cover for your desires, egoistic demands and vital insistences, if you put these things in place of the true aspiration or mix them with it and try to impose them on the Divine Shakti, then it is idle to invoke the divine Grace to transform you.

If you open yourself on the one side or in one part to the Truth and on another side are constantly opening the gates to hostile forces, it is vain to expect that the divine Grace will abide with. You must keep the temple clean if you wish to instal there the living presence...

If you call for the Truth and yet something in you chooses what is false, ignorant and undivine or even simply is unwilling to reject it altogether, then always you will be open to attack and the Grace will recede from you. Detect first what is false or obscure in you and persistently reject it, then alone can you rightly call for the divine Power to transform you.

Do not imagine that truth and falsehood, light and darkness, surrender and selfishness can be allowed to dwell together in the house consecrated to the Divine. The transformation must be integral, and integral therefore the rejection of all that withstands it.''

I find Sri Aurobindo's work, when put into practice - and it is designed to be practical first and foremost - seriously challenging and unceasingly inspirational.
It's interesting to also give his words your highest translation, from wherever that is drawn from in your own path. Aurobindo is both the icing and the cake, and from which pure nectar is even further drawn when further exemplified from the wonderful lenses of philosophical & evolutionary geniuses such as Ken Wilber & the Andrew Cohen who have draw profoundly from his work. Meshed together, as clear as daylight, I say this is the stuff that extremely evolved integrity is born of.

Deep bows to the catalysts who dare to speak sense, truth. wisdom, and who keep pushing the language and understanding of uncharted territories. XxxXXXxXXXXXXXXXXXxxXXXxxXx

Beautiful.