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===Habits of the Physical===
The physical is terribly pessimistic. It is steeped in atavistic habits of helplessness, contradiction, and also catastrophe—it is terribly pessimistic... Only gradually, by constantly turning to the Divine, can it start to hope things will improve a little. <ref>https://incarnateword.in/agenda/13/january-22-1972#p1</ref>
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There are many ["defects of the physical consciousness"]—but mainly obscurity, inertia, tamas, a passive acceptance of the play of wrong forces, inability to change, attachment to habits, lack of plasticity, forgetfulness, loss of experiences or realisations gained, unwillingness to accept the Light or to follow it, incapacity (through tamas or through attachment or through passive reaction to accustomed forces) to do what it admits to be the Right and the Best. <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/31/levels-of-the-physical-being#p2</ref>
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… finally, habits!... There is a charming phrase here—I appreciated it fully—in which Sri Aurobindo is asked, "What is meant by the physical adhering to its own habits'?" What are the habits which the physical must throw off? It is this terrible, frightful preference for the food you were used to when you were very young, the food you ate in the country where you were born and about which you feel when you no longer get it that you have not anything at all to eat, that you are miserable.
<ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/06/9-june-1954#p6</ref>
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The human body has always been in the habit of answering to whatever forces chose to lay hands on it and illness is the price it pays for its inertia and ignorance. It has to learn to answer to the one Force alone, but that is not easy for it to learn. <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/31/illness-and-health#p77</ref>
… [the idea that things cannot change] also is the fault of the physical consciousness. It is obsessed by the idea that "what is" must be,—that the habit of things cannot be altered. This inevitability it extends not only to what is but to what it merely thinks of as a fact—it lays itself open inertly to every suggestion or possibility that seems to be justified by the habit of things. It is the main obstacle to the material change. <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/31/difficulties-of-the-physical-nature#p72</ref>
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