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The Challenge of Changing Human Nature · Sri Aurobindo Studies

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  Those individuals who take up the practice of yoga for the
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  purpose of transformation of the nature and the development of
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  wider and higher states of consciousness inevitably find
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  that the influence of the physical and vital basis upon
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  which human life is based represents one of the greatest,
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  if not actually the greatest, obstacles to their spiritual
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  development. The idea of changing human
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  nature, overcoming the embedded habits, the atavistic
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  tendencies, the ingrained responses bred into human
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  existence for many millennia is one that most people consider to
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  be essentially impossible. If we look, however, at the long
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  trend of evolution, we see that indeed, while many things are
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  deeply embedded, other elements can and do change, evolve, grow
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  and progress. The challenge then, for the
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  practitioner of yoga is how to speed up these changes and
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  support the evolutionary trend in a compressed time period.
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  This is clearly not something easy nor instantly successful,
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  but it is something achievable with patience and persistence,
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  along with a scrupulous review of the motive forces that rise
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  up in many cases without our conscious attention and control
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  to continue the habitual patterns of the past, Sri
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  Robindo writes in the Synthesis of Yoga quote.
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  The principle of dark and dull inertia is at it life's basis.
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  All are tied down by the body and its needs and desires to a
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  trivial mind, petty desires and emotions, an insignificant
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  repetition of small worthless functionings, needs, cares,
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  occupations, pains, pleasures that lead to nothing beyond
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  themselves and bear the stamp of an ignorance that knows not its
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  own. Why and wither.
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  This physical mind of inertia believes in no divinity other
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  than its small earth gods. It aspires perhaps to a greater
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  comfort, order, pleasure, but asks no uplifting and no
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  spiritual deliverance. At the centre we meet a stronger
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  will of life with a greater gusto, but it is a blinded
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  demon, a perverted spirit, and exults in the very elements that
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  make of life a striving turmoil and an unhappy imbroglio.
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  It is a soul of human or Titanic desire, clinging to the garish
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  colour, disordered poetry, violent tragedy or stirring
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  melodrama of the mixed flux of good and evil, joy and sorrow,
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  light and darkness, heady rapture and bitter torture.
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  It loves these things, and would have more and more of them, or
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  even when it suffers and cries out against them, can accept or
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  joy in nothing else. It hates and revolts against
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  higher things, and in its fury would trample, tear, or crucify
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  any diviner power that has the presumption to offer to make
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  life pure, luminous, and happy, and snatch from its lips the
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  fiery brew of that exciting mixture.
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  Another will in life there is that is ready to follow the
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  ameliorating ideal mind, and is allured by its offer to extract
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  some harmony, beauty, light, nobler order out of life.
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  But this is a smaller part of the vital nature, and can be
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  easily overpowered by its more violent or darker, duller yoke
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  comrades. Nor does it readily lend itself
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  to a call higher than that of the mind, unless that call
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  defeats itself, as religion usually does, by lowering its
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  demands to conditions more intelligible to our obscure
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  vital nature. All these forces the spiritual
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  seeker grows aware of in himself and finds all around him, and
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  has to struggle and combat incessantly to be rid of their
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  grip and dislodge the long entrenched mastery they have
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  exercised over his own being as over the environ in human
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  existence. The difficulty is great, for
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  their hold is so strong, so apparently invincible, that it
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  justifies the disdainful dictum which compares human nature to a
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  dog's tail. For straighten it never so much
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  by force of ethics, religion, reason, or any other redemptive
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  effort. It returns in the end always to
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  the crooked curl of nature, and so great is the vim, the clutch
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  of that more agitated life will. So immense the peril of its
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  passions and errors, so subtly insistent or persistently
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  invasive, so obstinate up to the very gates of heaven, the fury
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  of its attack, or the tedious obstruction of its obstacles,
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  that even the St. and the Yogin cannot be sure of their
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  liberated purity or their trained self mastery against its
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  intrigue or its violence. End Quote.
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  Reference Srioro Bindo and the Mother, Looking from Within,
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  Chapter 1, Looking at Life and Circumstances, pages 17 to 19.