It is not something fixed, but generally one can say that the call for yoga comes when the soul has reached a point of development where it is no more identified with just the bodily life and the life of vital desires as if they were everything. It means that the soul is now identified with the higher mind, with the mental ego and yet has begun to feel stifled within it as in a shell. It realises the limitations of the world of appearances built for us by the senses and begins to question the real purpose of one’s life and existence. Also a certain degree of Sattwic development that awakens in oneself the will to do the ‘right thing’, live according to some ideal principle or ethic, a seeking for Truth, Harmony, Beauty and Good. These are the signs that one is ready for the Yoga.
There is also, in many, the sense of ‘strangeness’ in the world as it is and the love of solitude.
(Follow-up Question:)
Why does a Soul choose Integral Yoga out of umpteen other paths?
That is due to the complex working of destiny, something decided even before the great adventure of the soul began in Time and Space. There are, of course, heroic souls that are not satisfied with individual Mukti and have a deep longing that this world becomes a beautiful place. These souls strive for perfection in Earthly life rather than regarding it as merely a place of suffering and sorrow.
Sri Aurobindo revealed the yet deeper truth.
‘_People make all sorts of effort to have God’s darshan; some even weep and weep, yet they fail to obtain it. We in the Asram don’t seem to have done very much, and yet we are here with you. What has brought this about?_
There are many things that have brought it about—a connection in past lives with the Mother and myself, the development of your nature in former births which made it possible for you to seek the Divine, bhakti in those lives bearing its fruit now—finally, the Divine Grace.’
October 1935
_Ref: The Mother with Letters on The Mother_
(https://incarnateword.in/cwsa/32/connections-in-past-lives#p7)
(Follow-up Question:)
Why did Sri Aurobindo compare embarking on the path of Yoga with a new Birth?
A new birth means a birth into a new consciousness that changes our way of perceiving, understanding, comprehending and thereby our inner motives in the world. There is an acceptance and a recognition of the Divine in our life and the aspiration to undertake the Path towards which we were asleep so far. This gives life a new purpose and a new goal. Hence, it is a new birth.
The Mother reveals.
‘It is truly, in the absolute sense of the phrase, a new birth.
You become a new person, and whatever may be the path or the difficulties of the path afterwards, that feeling never leaves you. It is not even something—like many other experiences—which withdraws, passes into the background, leaving you externally with a kind of vague memory to which it is difficult to cling, whose remembrance grows faint, blurred—it is not that. You are a new person and definitively that, whatever happens. And even all the incapacity of the mind, all the difficulties of the vital, all the inertia of the physical are unable to change this new state—a new state which makes a decisive break in the life of the consciousness. The being one was before and the being one is after, are no longer the same. The position one has in the universe and in relation to it, in life and in relation to it, in understanding and in relation to it, is no longer the same: it is a true reversal which can never be undone again.’
4 June 1958
_Ref: Questions and Answers (1957 – 1958)_
(https://incarnateword.in/cwm/09/4-june-1958)
Affectionately,
Alok Da
