Changes

=Recommended Practices=

Whatever you do you can find interest in it, provided you take it as the means of progressing; you must try to do better and better what you are doing, the will for progress must always be there and then you take interest in what you do, whatever it is. The most insignificant occupation can prove interesting if you take it that way.

But even the most attractive and important activity will soon lose all its interest for you if the will for progress towards an ideal perfection is not there while you act. <ref>https://incarnateword.in/cwm/14/laziness-tiredness-fatigue-tamas#p6,p7</ref>

Take no notice of it and go on with your programme as usual. It is the quickest way of getting rid of it. <ref>https://incarnateword.in/cwm/14/laziness-tiredness-fatigue-tamas#p9</ref>

You must exert your consciousness, your will, your force, gather your energy, shake yourself a little and whip yourself and say: “Hup! Hup! forward, march.”If it is laziness that keeps you back from, say, doing the vaulting, you must immediately do something much more tiring and say: "Well, you don't want to do that? All right, you are going to do 1500 metres running!" Or else: "I don't want to do the weight-lifting today, I don't feel like doing it: good, I shall do skipping 4000 times at a stretch." <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/05/24-june-1953#p22</ref>

There is only one way of acting truly,it is to try at each moment, each second, in each movement to express only the highest truth one can perceive, and at the same time know that this perception has to be progressive and that what seems to you the most true now will no longer be so tomorrow, and that a higher truth will have to be expressed more and more through you. This leaves no room any longer for sleeping in a comfortable tamas; one must be always awake—I am not speaking of physical sleep—one must be always awake, always conscious and always full of an enlightened receptivity and of goodwill. To want always the best, always the best, always the best and never tell oneself, “Oh! It is tiring! Let me rest, let me relax! Ah, I am going to stop making an effort”; then one is sure to fall into a hole immediately and make a big stupid blunder! <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/07/31-august-1955#p18</ref>

For the inertia the remedy is not to absorb yourself in thoughts about it, but to turn upwards and call the Light and Force to come into it. <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/31/wrong-movements-of-the-vital#p46</ref>

==Detachment==

When the Force is there at work, the imperfections and weaknesses of the nature will necessarily arise for change, but one need not fight with them; one can look on them quietly as a surface instrumentation that has to be changed. It is not with “indifference” that one has to look at them, for that might mean inertia, a want of will or push or necessity to change; it is rather with detachment.

Detachment means that one stands back from them, does not identify oneself with them or get upset or troubled because they are there, but rather looks on them as something foreign to one's true consciousness and true self, rejects them and calls in the Mother's Force into these movements to eliminate them and bring the true consciousness and its movements there. The firm will of rejection must be there, the pressure to get rid of them, but not any wrestling or struggle. <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/30/descent-and-the-lower-nature#p12</ref>

==Hatha Yoga==

The power of physical immobility is as important in Hathayoga as the power of mental immobility in the Yoga of knowledge…

...the immobility of the Asana is to get rid of the restlessness imposed on the body and to force it to hold the Pranic energy instead of dissipating and squandering it. The experience in the practice of Asana is not that of a cessation and diminution of energy by inertia, but of a great increase, inpouring, circulation of force. The body, accustomed to work off superfluous energy by movement, is at first ill able to bear this increase and this retained inner action and betrays it by violent tremblings; afterwards it habituates itself and, when the Asana is conquered, then it finds as much ease in the posture, however originally difficult or unusual to it, as in its easiest attitudes sedentary or recumbent. It becomes increasingly capable of holding whatever amount of increased vital energy is brought to bear upon it without needing to spill it out in movement, and this increase is so enormous as to seem illimitable, so that the body of the perfected Hathayogin is capable of feats of endurance, force, unfatigued expenditure of energy of which the normal physical powers of man at their highest would be incapable. For it is not only able to hold and retain this energy, but to bear its possession of the physical system and its more complete movement through it. The life energy, thus occupying and operating in a powerful, unified movement on the tranquil and passive body, freed from the restless balancing between the continent power and the contained, becomes a much greater and more effective force. In fact, it seems then rather to contain and possess and use the body than to be contained, possessed and used by it,—just as the restless active mind seems to seize on and use irregularly and imperfectly whatever spiritual force comes into it, but the tranquillised mind is held, possessed and used by the spiritual force. <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/23/hathayoga#p8</ref>

=Gunas=

The three forms of consciousness are the three sides of Nature represented by the three gunas—force of subconscious tamas, Inertia, which is the law of Matter, force of half-conscious desire, Kinesis, which is rajas, which is the law of Life, force of sattwic Prakasha, which is the law of Intelligence. <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/28/the-sankhya-yoga-system#p16</ref>