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Controlling One's Imagination · Sri Aurobindo Studies

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  More frequently than not, the spiritual aspirant has both a
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  great upward aspiration and a corresponding not that he needs
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  to work out which is the counterpart to the upward
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  capacity. It is the dynamic tension
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  between the two that forces him to persevere.
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  He will either give in to the lower impulse or find a way to
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  work it out, dissolve it, eliminate it, and realized the
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  highest potentiality of his being, the mother observes.
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  Quote. I have known people with such
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  opposite sides in their nature, so contradictory, that one day
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  they could make a magnificent, luminous, powerful formation for
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  realization, and then the next day a defeatist dark black
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  formation, a formation of despair.
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  And so both would go out. And I was able to follow in the
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  course of circumstances, the beautiful one being realized,
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  and while it was being realized, the dark one demolishing what
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  the first one had done. And that is how it is in the
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  larger lines of life, as in its smaller details and all that.
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  Because 1 does not watch oneself thinking, because one believes 1
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  is the slave of these contradictory movements.
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  Because one says, oh, today I'm not feeling well.
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  Oh, today things seem sad to me. And one says this as if it were
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  an ineluctable fate against which one could do nothing.
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  But if one stands back or ascends a step, one can look at
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  all these things, put them in their place, keep some, destroy
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  or get rid of those one does not want, and put all one's
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  imaginative power. What is called imaginative only
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  in those one wants and which can form with one's highest
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  aspiration. That is what I call controlling
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  1's imagination. It is very interesting when one
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  learns to do it and does it regularly.
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  One no longer has time to feel bored, and instead of being a
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  cork afloat on the waves of the sea and tossed here and there by
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  each wave defenselessly, one becomes a bird which opens its
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  wings, flies above the waves and goes wherever it wants.
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  End Quote. Reference Sriorubindu and the
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  Mother Powers within, Chapter 3. Imagination, page 30.